radiofree.asia

Category: Op-Ed

  • From COVID to Monkeypox, Our Health System Failed. We Need Medicare for All.

    Racial inequities are emerging in the vaccination and treatment of monkeypox, just as we saw with COVID. In recent weeks, roughly 25 percent of new monkeypox cases have occurred among white patients. Yet more than 33 percent of monkeypox vaccines have gone to white patients (as of September 27).

    Financial and logistical barriers to monkeypox care can disproportionately affect patients of color. In New York City, appointments for monkeypox treatment and vaccination, distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis, have disproportionately gone to wealthy, white individuals who have better access to the health care system. The first vaccines were doled out in Chelsea, a mostly white neighborhood, during the middle of the workday on Thursday. Even when vaccines began to be distributed in Harlem (a neighborhood that is 82 percent non-white), appointments appeared to go largely to white residents from outside the community, leaving community members frustrated.

    Such disparities mirror larger trends in society. Across specialties, physicians disproportionately spend their time seeing white patients, despite patients of color, on average, having higher medical needs. Due to the legacy of slavery, Indigenous genocide, xenophobic immigration regulations and centuries of racist economic policies, patients of color are more likely to be under- or uninsured, and in general, have lower incomes. Patients of color are also more likely to experience difficulties accessing transportation, or taking paid time off work to access appointments. The latter is particularly important for individuals with monkeypox, which requires prolonged isolation, and whose painful lesions can inhibit the ability to work.

    We need explicitly anti-racist policies to repair these harms. Medicare for All would eliminate financial barriers to health care, and in doing so, help address the racial inequities highlighted by the monkeypox pandemic.

    Medicare for All would establish a “single-payer” system, in which all U.S. residents would receive health insurance. All U.S. residents would have access to medications, doctor appointments and hospitalizations with low or no copayments. Undocumented individuals could be covered under the current House bill, as to be determined by the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.

    Studies show that Medicare for All would have saved 340,000 lives so far during the COVID pandemic, primarily by eliminating financial barriers to care, while saving billions of dollars annually. It’s a rare “free lunch” in economic policy, because savings under a single-payer system far outstrip the costs of expanding coverage. The U.S. spends nearly a third of all health care dollars on administration, approximately $800 billion annually, primarily coming in the form of private health insurance company overhead and profits. Medicare’s fee-for-service plan, in contrast, has 2.4 percent overhead.

    Medicare for All could address racial disparities in monkeypox access by making all services free of charge, disproportionately benefiting racial and ethnic minorities. Most Americans would see their incomes rise, not only because premiums and copayments would fall to near zero, but because for the majority of Americans with employer-sponsored insurance, the potential salary that is currently tied up in insurance subsidies would be freed up.

    Taken together, these financial boons could disproportionately benefit people of color who are more likely to delay health care because of cost. It’s notable that in the Veterans Health Administration, a single-payer health care system, many racial disparities in health outcomes are mitigated or absent.

    When diseases like monkeypox disproportionately affect communities of color, the financial impact on hospital systems is not equal, reproducing structural racism. In general, hospitals primarily serving patients of color earn fewer profits, since these patients are disproportionately uninsured or covered by public insurance, which reimburses less than private insurance. This codifies a perverse financial system in which white lives are more valued than the lives of people of color.

    Over the past few decades, this has also led to an arms race among health care systems, which invest in lucrative projects to attract privately insured (disproportionately white) patients, driving up the cost of care for all in the process. Meanwhile, clinics that serve people of color remain underfunded.

    It doesn’t have to be this way. Medicare for All would establish a financing system called “global budgeting” that could allocate resources based on need, similar to how we currently finance fire departments. It’s a common-sense approach that aligns dollars with need. Safety net and rural hospitals, which are currently closing at record rates, would see boosts in revenue, and unnecessary or wasteful spending would be curtailed. This would be a boon for clinics which focus on lower reimbursing areas, like primary care, mental health, and yes, infectious diseases.

    The early days of the monkeypox pandemic have been plagued by supply chain and logistical challenges. Vaccines remain scarce and maldistributed. Contact tracing and testing have been challenging. Medicare for All wouldn’t, in and of itself, fix all of these problems, but it would enable a national electronic medical record, mitigating logistical hurdles that result from our byzantine, multi-payer health system.

    For example, in 2020, Taiwan’s lauded initial response to COVID would not have been possible without its single-payer system and national health insurance database, which streamlined contact tracing and communication.

    There will be more pandemics after monkeypox and COVID-19. Narrow, disease-specific measures, such as those passed in 2020 making COVID hospitalizations free, expire with time, serving only as Band-Aids. Other incremental reforms are politically attractive, but mathematically infeasible, as they do not come with the administrative savings of a single-payer system.

    There is a saying in medicine that the United States does not have a “health care system,” we have a “sick care” system. Among wealthy nations, the U.S. stands out for its uniquely reactive, profit-driven system which is disinterested in prevention. The monkeypox pandemic makes this all the more clear, and also sheds a light on structural racism in our health care system. By advocating for Medicare for All, we can build a better system, fundamentally reoriented to justice and public health, one that prioritizes people over profits and takes a necessary step toward confronting racial inequities in our society.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Grassroots Climate Organizers Led the Way to Scrapping Manchin’s Dirty Deal

    Frontline climate leaders just secured a huge win by stopping West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s pipeline bill from weaseling into the Senate’s key funding bill. In the face of fierce opposition, conservative Democrat Manchin asked Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) to remove this “permitting reform” bill from the continuing resolution just hours before they voted on its fate.

    The importance of this national victory being accomplished by frontline organizers cannot be understated. Frontline leaders joined forces together to lobby and call their representatives, tell their stories, and rally in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere, with the support of “Big Green” environmentalists. This was made possible by years of relationship building amongst frontline organizations and, notably, efforts to repair the relationships between grassroots organizations and Big Greens. On the latter, there is still a lot to be done, but this was a significant step where big organizations followed the lead of the grassroots and uplifted their voices, even after grassroots voices were left out of conversations about the Inflation Reduction Act that many of these Big Greens trumpeted as a win.

    Manchin’s bill threatened to fast-track the pipeline I spent my days fighting to stop. Prior to my time fighting the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), I was a national climate organizer with 350.org and before that I was a global climate advocate with the World Resources Institute. I have seen many wins and losses in the climate movement and this one strikes me as particularly special.

    Before the news broke that Manchin had side-swept his side deal, I tried not to think about what would happen if this bill passed because it threatened to overturn the core objective of my work: stopping the Mountain Valley Pipeline. But late one night after a long day of work, I sat down in my living room and let myself consider what was at stake. From my perspective in the MVP fight, what came to mind was the near-decade fight to stop this pipeline from steamrolling through Appalachia. I saw the faces of all the people I fight alongside who have been in this from the start and who have dedicated their life to stopping this pipeline. These people have set aside their lives as outdoor adventurers, farmers and coffee baristas to prevent this pipeline from destroying what they love most: their people and mountains. At that moment, the audacity of Sen. Joe Manchin to sacrifice his own constituents to fast-track an unnecessary pipeline during a climate crisis in order to get more money from a dying industry filled me with rage. Then despair — and I broke down into tears.

    My partner, sitting next to me, was surprised. “You’re usually so realistic. You usually say, ‘I don’t know if we’ll win but the one thing I can do is try.’” And it’s true. As a queer person of color from the Global South, I’m used to seeing communities like mine put in losing positions, so I stay prepared for that. But I felt like I had been carrying an insurmountable weight for weeks that I hadn’t let myself acknowledge, and acknowledging it felt earth-shattering.

    I joined the Mountain Valley Pipeline fight in part because the people in West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina that this pipeline is targeting are continually sacrificed for political and financial gain and I have seen the same thing done to my communities over centuries. I have fostered life-long friendships in this moment and with the land that the pipeline threatens. The moment I burst into tears in my living room was also the moment I acknowledged how much this frontline fight meant to me.

    The reason I am in the climate movement is to make sure that voices like mine from communities like mine are listened to. This fight against Manchin’s dirty deal felt like a moment where they finally were. In early September, I helped organize a rally in D.C. to stop this deal and that rally featured Appalachian, Indigenous, Black and working-class organizers on the front lines of environmental injustice fights. Seeing them on the stage with a crowd of 600 people and representing hundreds of thousands of people from across the country felt historic. It’s not often that people like me and the folks I work with get to see ourselves and our power represented in Washington, D.C., but those leaders traveled across the country to make sure we were heard, and many Congresspeople joined our opposition, helping us secure this win.

    The climate movement is stronger coming out of this win and that is because we followed those on the front lines. In order to avoid the worst of the climate crisis and ensure a livable future, we must keep that up.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Los Angeles Teachers Are Burned Out and Priced Out of Living in Their City

    “The rent is too damn high.”

    That adage sums up a major reason Los Angeles educators feel burned — and priced — out. A recent report from the local teachers union lists unaffordable housing, large class sizes and over testing of students as contributors to teacher stress. As the nation contends with a teacher shortage that, in some regions, has been exacerbated by book bans, parental rights bills and anti-LGBTQ+ laws, educators in locations with greater academic freedom still have challenges.

    This year, a series of teacher strikes occurred in Democratic-led cities including Minneapolis, Sacramento, Seattle and Columbus, where teachers said they were striking to draw attention to their financial hardships and the additional supports students need. Teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) have similar concerns, with 70 percent contemplating leaving the profession entirely, according to the study “Burned Out, Priced Out: Solutions to the Teacher Shortage.”

    Released last month, the report from United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) draws on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the California Commission on Teacher Certification, and a survey of more than 13,000 educators to identify the primary factors affecting teacher well-being. Their worries are largely economic: Uncompetitive pay not only makes it difficult to afford housing but has also resulted in more than a quarter of UTLA members working a second job to make ends meet, the study determined.

    The financial challenges teachers encounter are often even more dire for students and their families, for whom homelessness is a pressing problem, UTLA noted. Given the grim financial realities that accompany life in one of the nation’s most expensive cities, the union recommends that the school district use its resources to support the emotional and economic needs of students and staff alike.

    “Our educators are one of the most educated workforces in the country, and a large percentage of those educators not only have college degrees but also obtain [postgraduate] degrees and certifications,” UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz told The 19th. “But our profession takes a wage penalty in comparison to other professions with similar requirements.”

    Over the past five years, the average LAUSD teacher earned between $74,000 and $79,000 annually, compared to a salary range of $94,000 to $101,000 for the average bachelor’s degree-holder in Los Angeles, the UTLA study found. Teacher salaries don’t reflect the rate of inflation, the report contends, a conclusion that a recent study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) also makes. The EPI analysis found that teachers nationwide earn 23.5 percent less than comparable college graduates, while the UTLA study found that its members earned 22 percent less than similarly educated Angelenos during the 2019-20 school year. To make up for this deficit, 28 percent of UTLA educators work another job to supplement their income, with 24.4 percent of teachers who’ve worked for the district for more than 20 years doing so.

    “Los Angeles Unified acknowledges that economic conditions, including insufficient pay, critical hardships and the COVID-19 pandemic, have complicated teacher recruitment nationwide,” a district spokesperson said in a statement to The 19th.

    The district did not discuss efforts it has made to retain veteran teachers such as Anthony Colla, a language and literature teacher at Eagle Rock Junior/Senior High in Northeast Los Angeles. He’s taught for LAUSD for 17 years and pads his income by teaching summer school and working 20 hours per week with the education consulting firm he started nearly 10 years ago.

    “I have two master’s degrees, and I’m still paying student loans,” he explained. His side gig gives him a 30 percent income bump. As a veteran teacher, he’s near the top of LAUSD’s salary schedule, he said, but his net pay is about $5,000 monthly. He’s grateful that he purchased his home 26 years ago, otherwise paying for housing would be a challenge.

    “If I had to pay the $4,000 market value rent for the property I live in — I own my home — I would not be able to afford it at all,” he said.

    First-year LAUSD teachers make $51,440, according to the UTLA study, which cites a June 2021 district finding that there’s no Los Angeles neighborhood where early career educators can live without being rent-burdened. According to the federal Brooke Amendment, which revised public housing guidelines in 1969, tenants should not spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. This isn’t possible for most UTLA educators, two-thirds of whom report being unable to afford housing in the neighborhoods where they teach.

    “It’s huge,” said Pedro Noguera, dean of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. “And it’s not just teachers. It’s police officers, firemen, all the clerical workers, custodians — if you are not fairly affluent, you can’t afford to live in L.A. And rents continue to rise, so you literally have teachers and secretaries and receptionists who commute … way over an hour each way to work. And that adds to the stress because then you start to say, ‘Is it worth it to travel this far for a job that is paying so little?’”

    The district has collaborated with developers on three affordable housing projects to enable employees to live in the communities where they work. Last year, it announced that a similar effort was underway to work with developers to build affordable-housing properties where LAUSD personnel would be prioritized as tenants.

    “Los Angeles Unified is broadening our partnerships to develop new opportunities for families and employees, which directly target housing affordability, working conditions and benefit packages,” a district spokesperson told The 19th. “The district remains committed to leveraging all resources to strengthen school communities.”

    That teachers struggle to afford housing indicates that teachers aren’t being paid what they’re worth, said Myart-Cruz. A number of educators she’s encountered supplement their income with gig economy jobs, working for companies such as DoorDash and Instacart during their off hours. In March, Airbnb announced a partnership with the National Education Association to help teachers serve as hosts and boost their wages, but the collaboration did not move forward. Still, teachers earned more than $276 million from hosting on Airbnb in 2021, the company announced in August.

    “It’s ridiculous. It’s shameful,” Myart-Cruz said of teachers having to take on additional work to raise their wages. “And not only that — folks have to grade papers. When do folks have that opportunity?”

    Another source of stress for teachers is the series of standardized tests they’re required to give each year. These tests limit the autonomy of teachers and overwhelm students, who take at least 100 standardized assessments by the time they reach sixth grade, the UTLA report states. UTLA wants the district to eliminate all standardized assessments that have not been government-mandated.

    “You need to assess kids to see how well they’re doing,” Noguera said. “But…I think what’s happened in many districts is they put too much emphasis on assessment and not enough emphasis on instruction. How do you make sure that kids are getting high quality instruction and the supports they need? So the teachers are probably right to push back on the amount of assessment that the district requires — not the state.”

    Colla estimates that he loses two weeks of instructional time to testing each school year. He said the process has become normalized for his students. As an experienced educator, however, he takes issue with the amount of standardized tests he has to administer.

    “Especially when you look at what it is precisely that the [test] is measuring, all these standardized tests … are measuring things which may or may not have any real bearing on how well the students are doing,” Colla said.

    During a year when teachers in urban and suburban districts alike have engaged in walkouts, Myart-Cruz isn’t ruling out a labor action but called talk of a strike “premature.”

    “But let’s be clear that we stand ready to have the conversations with our members about respect,” she said. “Our educators did a yeoman’s job in this pandemic, flipping their entire lives, their entire curriculum to a platform they didn’t even know themselves. First they got applauded for doing a yeoman’s job and then they got lambasted for not coming back sooner. Our educators did that, held it together, and they should be paid what they’re worth.”

    Colla said that teaching online during the pandemic was his most difficult period as an educator. His struggles haven’t ended now that school is back in person for the second consecutive school year. Students still have learning deficits, and he can’t access all of the digital learning tools he needs due to a recent ransomware attack on the district. The recent political attacks on teachers nationwide haven’t helped his mental health either, particularly because he identifies as queer.

    “It doesn’t affect me directly,” he said of laws such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay.” “But it affects me indirectly because it’s a continuing move in this country to denigrate educators, to make teachers the bad guy, the fall guy, the straw man. It’s a pseudo-intellectual movement where one person’s completely uneducated opinion is considered just as valid as another highly educated individual’s position, and that’s simply not true. The whole move towards ‘Don’t Say Gay’ and banning books — we know what kind of governments ban books. The governments that ban books are fascist.”

    In some parts of the country, restrictions on what educators can say in class or teach have prompted them to leave the education profession entirely.

    “Across the country, teachers are feeling stressed out from the lingering effects of the pandemic just like a lot of kids, so we have seen mental health challenges amongst teachers, rising depression, anxiety, and the school shootings have made it worse,” Noguera said. “Then you have the politics of the moment … All of that is adding to the pressures on teachers and making many question whether or not they want to continue teaching.”

    As conservative lawmakers limit what students can read and educators can teach, UTLA is pushing for its progressive policies to become realities in LAUSD. Educators should be able to afford housing where they teach, Myart-Cruz said.

    “We have 86 pages worth of proposals, and all of them are righteous,” she said. “But we also need people to have some gumption to do the necessary things to make sure that our kids have holistic learning environments.”

    *Nadra Nittle is married to an LAUSD teacher and UTLA member.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • William Rivers Pitt Dared to Hope for Our Future. Let’s Do Right by His Memory.

    In sitting down to the impossible task of memorializing William Rivers Pitt, Truthout’s illustrious and brilliant lead columnist whose work I edited for 15 years, I’m suppressing the urge to grab my phone and call Will.

    “I don’t know how to begin your eulogy,” I would say.

    “Easy!” he’d reply. “Lead with a trusty classic. You know the one.”

    And I’d know what he meant — the Irish blessing Will often shared with our staff in tough times. This is Will’s slightly adapted version of that old prayer, whose author is unknown:

    May the road rise up to meet you.

    May the wind be always at your back.

    May the sun shine warm upon your face;

    May the rains fall soft upon your fields.

    And until we meet again,

    May God (or Whatever) hold you in the palm of their hand.

    I love the blessing because it captures something about how Will connected with his readers: He saw the act of writing as an act of care. In his columns, even as he condemned Trump and excoriated complicit Democrats, even as he spoke out against imperial war and corporate greed and racism and the destruction of the environment, he made his audience understand that they deserved the warmth of the sun and the nourishment of the rain, just by virtue of being human.

    Even as he raged against evil, Will loved humanity, and the Earth itself, with an even greater fervor.

    Will wrote of how that great love hummed at the core of his being: “I came into this world a human tuning fork, humming with the tones surrounding me entirely against my will. I cannot stop it, and would not if given the chance. Mine is wonder, and awe, and I am overtaken by it, as if the air itself is transformed into high waves breaking on the beach. I drown daily, hourly, in minutes and in seconds, I drown in moments, and smile as I sink, because it is beautiful beyond words and space and time.” He contrasted that love with the remorseless darkness that, too, pervades the world. But, Will assured his readers, even in the face of horror and heartbreak, “You are not alone. Reach for the light, always. It is there. I know. I’ve seen.”

    Those words are from a eulogy Will wrote for actor Robin Williams. Will wrote many eulogies, because he was not afraid to confront deep pain, and hoped to help ease the pain of others — and also because he wanted to memorialize each person who, as he put it in a tribute to peace activist Jerry Berrigan, “cared an awful lot.”

    How do you eulogize a eulogist? A person who wrote such moving, compassionate, exquisitely articulated tributes that you wished the honoree could come back from the dead to read them?

    How do you eulogize a proclaimer, a person with a singular gift for characterizing a moment, a feeling, a political climate, a global climate in a way that made you feel just a little bit better — because he found the words that echoed the turmoil burning inside you, too, and called you to action?

    How do you eulogize a wordsmith, someone who coined a new expression in every column, often sending me, his editor, frantically searching through the Oxford English Dictionary for clues as to the adage’s origin … only to realize it was actually Will’s spontaneous invention?

    All I can do is tell you: Will was all of these things, and he was also more than the sum of them. Will Pitt was a gem at the center of Truthout. At the time of his death, Will had been at Truthout for over 20 years. He left his job as a high school English teacher to tackle the horrors of the Bush era, writing with a pure, raging fire, dutifully cataloguing every injustice the Republicans of that epoch perpetrated. As the Bush regime ended, Will urged us not to lose our memory of those injustices, in an open letter to the former president: “We have tasted the soot and smelled the blood on the wind; we have seen how fragile our way of government is when placed in the hands of low men such as you, and because of that, you will be remembered for all time.”

    Will Pitt was a leading voice in exposing the outrages of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Beyond his Truthout columns that touched millions of people, he was a bestselling author of several books focused on the Iraq war, including War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know (co-authored with Scott Ritter), The Greatest Sedition Is Silence, House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America’s Ravaged Reputation, and The Mass Destruction of Iraq: The Disintegration of a Nation, Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible (co-authored with Dahr Jamail).

    Our greatest electoral politics analyst, Will knew the ins and outs of Washington far better than the back of his hand, and blogged through every election for the past 15 years. He also knew the limits of party politics: Will was the Republicans’ most comprehensive denouncer, but he also warned of the enormous dangers of “moderate” Democrats.

    Will persistently sounded the alarm on the climate crisis for many years before the mainstream media took real notice. He urged us to recognize that the catastrophe was not simply a phenomenon of the future: “The future is now,” he wrote, “and it is hot, thirsty, windy and dangerous. This truth is baked into tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow again…. How much worse it gets depends upon us.”

    He repeatedly reminded us of Trump’s danger, even at times when many on the left wanted to simply laugh. “They laughed at Mussolini, too,” Will wrote, “until it became a crime to do so. After that, the joke was on the world.” And the signs of the January 6 coup attempt were clear to Will nearly two years before that day came to pass.

    When pandemic times hit, Will dedicated himself to covering COVID — he wrote nearly a hundred columns about it — even when it became the unpopular topic, the one people wanted to move on from. He emphasized the ways in which the pandemic was entwined with the crisis of corporate power. At each pandemic peak, he reminded us, “[COVID] has not gone away and returned; it never left, and swells every few months whenever we decide to let our guard down because capitalism must be fed.”

    Will was not a commentator for comment’s sake: He wanted his words to spur deeds. He urged readers to go beyond simply reading, no matter how small their actions, and he recognized that even seemingly small actions can save lives. “There is much to be done just within reach of your arm,” he was fond of saying, when speaking of the climate crisis. “Do that, and you’ll have one hell of a story, along with, perhaps, people left to hear the telling.”

    Will reminded us that when things are hardest, when fascism is ascendant, when war is imminent—that is when we must “dig in,” must “embrace the winter,” must dissent, dissent, dissent.

    Will dissented against injustice through his writing, but he also dissented against our culture of individualism and competition through his striking generosity of spirit, which blossomed over time, particularly after he became a father. Anyone who knows Will knows his wholehearted, wholeminded dedication to his daughter. His stubborn hope for our shared future was tied to his determination to help build a world in which his daughter would “get the chance to know what it is to reach, to fly, to rise, to become.”

    Will strove to teach his daughter to “do the right thing when nobody is looking,” and within Truthout’s staff, he did just that. He reached out to people regularly when he learned they were going through a rough patch, and was always quick to drop inspiring words into our group chat in times of collective crisis. He evolved a humble and amiable writerly spirit. As an editor, I am not used to hearing the words, “You’re right!” But Will was not afraid to acknowledge that a paragraph should be cut here or there. He also acknowledged his interpersonal mistakes, and became a profuse apologizer (even when he’d done nothing wrong!); he believed in accountability and sought to put this belief into action on the micro level, with both humor and sincerity. Will Pitt saw the point and the power of relationships; he knew that, in these cataclysmic times, we must learn to work together, if life on Earth is to survive.

    Will’s understanding of the perilousness of life on Earth pervaded each piece he wrote. Yet so did the reality that we can’t predict the future: We have to do the future. Last year, in a column commemorating his 20th anniversary at Truthout, Will wrote:

    If I could make any wish, it would be to get another 20 years to do this, if only for the chance to sit here two decades hence and talk about all the good shit that went down after we cured COVID, kept Trump out of office, vanquished fascism, found a way to turn CO2 and methane into marijuana fertilizer, and shot all that sea-bound plastic into space.

    Likely as not, though, I’ll be back here in 20 years talking about the day we lost Boston and New York to the Atlantic Ocean. Or maybe not.

    That’s the thing about tomorrow: It’s only a rumor. The rest is up to us.

    William Rivers Pitt reminded us that the fate of the world is not decided. We have a choice: Will we speak out even when we’re not sure our words will make a difference? Will we gather the courage to act in the face of injustice? Will we admit when we’ve screwed up, and transform the circumstances to create more beauty and love in the wake of mistakes? Will we commit acts of radical kindness even when no one is looking? Will we put our faith in humanity, even when the odds look grim? For Will, the answers were yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

    Will often ended his columns with the gentle encouragement, “Stout hearts!” It was a reminder that although we can’t always mentally strategize our way out of turbulent times, we can get through them together using deeper human tools: compassion, vulnerability, real feeling, righteous anger, righteous love.

    As we face the impossibility of this larger-than-life man’s death, we must turn to those tools. I’m going to let myself feel Will’s death fully. I’m going to cry angry tears for a long time. I’m going to rededicate myself to the work of transforming this screwed-up world, in community with all of you.

    As Will taught us, “All I have, all you have, all we have, is the power to do good and right within our own reach.”

    We’ve worked with Will’s family to create this fundraiser in the hopes of raising some money to support Lola’s needs, including her future education. All funds raised will go directly to a trust for Lola. Please give what you can.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Florida Mail Carriers Win Back Sunday Breaks With Direct Action

    A simple grievance can take many months to get results. But at the post office where I work, we got fast results defending our breaks with a different approach: direct action.

    I’m a city carrier assistant (CCA) — part of the lower-paid second tier of letter carriers — in Naples, Florida. The retention rate for CCAs nationwide hovers around 20 percent.

    Letter carriers start each day by sorting the mail and loading it into our trucks. In my post office, Mondays through Saturdays we take our first 10-minute break together inside the office, with the air conditioning, before heading out to start deliveries.

    We used to take our breaks together on Sundays, too. We would chip in for donuts and coffee, a sign of our camaraderie.

    But in April, the Postal Service implemented a new way of doing the Sunday package runs. (On Sundays we don’t deliver letters, just parcels, mainly for Amazon.) They had half the workforce coming in first to load trucks, and the other half coming in later to start deliveries — and we were no longer allowed to take our Sunday morning break in the office.

    By the middle of the summer, we were back to the old way of loading and delivering. Everyone was back to clocking in at the same time on Sundays, 8:30 a.m.

    But management was still refusing to let us take Sunday morning breaks together. They wanted us to hit the road and take our breaks out on the street, in the heat.

    “It’s Break Time”

    At 9 a.m. on Sunday, August 21, my alarm went off as it usually does Mondays through Saturdays. I said what I usually say those days: “It’s break time, ladies and gentlemen.” Three other workers and I started walking towards the break room.

    Our supervisor stated, loudly, in front of all of us on the loading dock, that there’s no breaks on Sundays. We shrugged that off and went to the break room. A minute later he was standing over us.

    He said we had two choices: Get back to work and take our 10-minute break out on the street, or go home.

    We weren’t expecting an ultimatum. But the four of us looked at each other, and we all said we would go home. We scanned our badges to clock out, and walked to our cars together in a state of shock.

    When I got home, I typed up a report on what had happened and posted it on one of the Facebook groups for union letter carriers. My post got 500 likes and a lot of positive feedback.

    Quick Results

    By Monday morning, our union president and the postmaster had discussed what happened and started to discuss a solution.

    A couple days later, management gathered us all together for a meeting to explain the new memorandum of understanding giving us back our Sunday morning office break, so long as we finished loading our trucks first. They posted it near the schedule for everyone to read.

    Twice during the week I was also called into meetings with management — once to discuss my attendance, and once to be asked a bunch of open-ended questions, such as “Was this premeditated? Were you planning all this?” I told them yes, of course I was planning to take a break. But I wasn’t issued any discipline.

    The following Sunday I brought in some juice and donuts for my co-workers to enjoy before they started delivering packages in the Florida heat.

    Union Strong

    My co-workers had to work harder and longer than normal that first Sunday when we chose to go home. But most are pleased with the result. Now every CCA across Naples — not just in my office — gets to take a break inside on Sundays.

    A brand new CCA started his career that same day, and was busy loading his truck when I made the decision to go home. He recently moved to Florida, after many years of having no union and bad bosses in New York.

    He has no bitterness towards me and the others who took action. Instead, witnessing from the beginning of his career the power of a union, he’s proud to be union and excited to get active. He recently attended his first union meeting.

    Maybe this will help with the Postal Service retention rate and help build a stronger, younger union. I’d say that’s a victory.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Socialists Need an Independent Approach to Gun Violence

    Among the many grim features of U.S. life in 2022, gun violence might be especially depressing because it is a crisis that seems so solvable and yet hopeless at the same time.

    We are trapped in a national gun debate between a rabidly political right wing and a stubbornly apolitical center, with the left nowhere in sight. On one side are demagogues in the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Republican Party who whip up fears of Black and Brown “criminals,” threatened masculinity and postindustrial decline. On the other side are organizations increasingly shaped by the narrow and technocratic solutions put forward by the organizations funded by Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York City mayor.

    As a result, the most horrific mass shootings, like those earlier in this year in Buffalo and Uvalde, are inevitably followed by an anguished but largely inane debate, with some saying “if only the shooter didn’t have a gun,” and others saying “if only everybody had a gun.”

    The hostility between the two sides masks similarities in their worldviews. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that New York State’s tight restrictions on “open carry” gun permits violated citizens’ Second Amendment right to self-defense. Among the many leading Democrats expressing outrage was New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who three months earlier had reestablished a special police unit with a history of excessive violence as part of an effort to crack down on illegal guns. The Republican-dominated Court and the Democratic mayor see themselves on opposite sides of the gun issue, but both want to put more people with guns on the street as a way to “reduce” violence.

    When, a week after the 2012 Newtown school shooting, NRA president Wayne LaPierre declared, “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” liberals were justifiably horrified. But few were willing and able to see that this disastrously violent mindset is also the core idea of modern law enforcement, and a driving force of U.S. history since the founding days of slave patrols and genocidal violence against Indigenous people.

    Establishing Common Ground on Guns Among the Left

    The socialist left in the U.S. has greatly impacted debates on health care, climate change and mass incarceration in recent years, but we’ve been largely silent on gun politics, unsure how to approach an issue with no clear solutions. We’re appalled by gun violence — whose primary victims are poor people of color, abused women and people with mental illness — but reject the brutal criminal legal system as a solution to violence. We support people’s right to armed self-defense — especially those who have the most reason to mistrust law enforcement — but see how the right uses self-defense rhetoric to advance “Stand Your Ground” legal doctrines that increase impunity of vigilantes and white nationalist militias.

    Socialists, feminists, abolitionists and anti-imperialists need more public discussions about whether we can come to some common positions about guns, gun violence and gun laws. I hope to lay out a useful framework for this process, starting with two core ideas.

    One: However gun rights are interpreted, they must be granted equally, something that has never been true in the U.S. The U.S. has a long history of both widespread access to guns for some and strict gun control for others. The Second Amendment enshrined the rights of white male citizens to be armed for the purpose of keeping arms out of the hands of Indigenous peoples and enslaved (and free) African Americans. Today, gun laws are written and selectively enforced to allow for both a gun-celebrating culture in much of the country and a police-state approach to gun possession among poor Black and Brown people. As a result, those who most need the right to armed self-defense are most likely to have it denied. Socialists have to fight for gun laws, whether they are strict or lax, to be applied equally.

    Two: Guns have generally been a more effective tool for reactionary forces operating in alliance with police and corporations than for the forces trying to fight them. Armed self-defense is an important right to be defended, but that is only a small part of what is required to make positive political change. For the left, our most powerful tool is collective struggle (occasionally armed but usually not). Those in power know this, and it’s no coincidence that most states that have seen an increase in “gun rights” have also seen a decrease in our right to protest. Socialists need to intervene in gun politics in a way that highlights and projects strength through building community and solidarity.

    Based on these two premises, I propose four broad principles that could form the basis of an independent socialist approach to some of the many facets of gun violence and U.S. gun culture.

    Universal Gun Safety Measures, Not Profiling for “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys”

    By far the most popular gun reforms are about expanding the use of the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Given how frequently background checks are mentioned in the media, it’s remarkable how few people know what the NICS checks for. While a few criteria, such as domestic violence and stalking, relate to behaviors directly tied to higher rates of violence, the majority of criteria do not. These categories — which include drug use, immigration status, felony convictions (which include a wide range of categories), and something called “mental defectives” — are more about stereotyping than violence prevention.

    It isn’t politically easy for socialists to oppose background checks at a time when people are understandably demanding that elected officials “do something” to stop mass shootings and (to a lesser extent) other forms of gun violence. But the entire premise of screenable categories of “good guys” and “bad guys” is misguided. Many mass shooters pass (or would be eligible to pass) the NICS, while many police officers — who enjoy exemptions from almost all gun restrictions — have far greater rates of both domestic violence and suicide than the general population.

    Then there are the troubling politics of background checks. After this summer’s passage of a bipartisan gun reform bill that increased background checks, Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) declared, “The legislation before us would make our communities and schools safer without laying one finger on the Second Amendment for law-abiding citizens.” We should be wary of cheering on any precedents that the current Supreme Court can use to declare that constitutional rights only apply to certain “law-abiding” segments of the population.

    There’s an alternative approach to profiling and scapegoating. The left needs to support universal gun safety measures that recognize that any of us are capable, under the wrong circumstances, of committing violence. Such measures could possibly include:

    • Universal public health and safety measures such as raising the age of gun ownership, waiting periods for all gun purchases, and safe storage laws.
    • A licensing system for gun ownership based on the automobile model, administered by public health agencies, not police departments.
    • Restricting the criteria for any background checks to past actions statistically linked to higher rates of gun violence, such as domestic violence.

    Democratic Power Over Gun Institutions, Not Police Power Over People

    Authoritarian approaches to public safety, shared by both sides of the current gun debate, call for arming and empowering “heroic protectors” — and demanding that the rest of us obey them. But these supposed heroes, whether they be cops or armed civilians, rarely prevent shootings. On the other hand, they certainly cause them: An astonishing one-third of all “stranger homicides” are committed by police officers.

    In contrast, democratic solutions look to the potential strength of communities to reduce sources of potential violence, from long-term efforts to reduce poverty and heal trauma to more immediate work in de-escalating conflicts. Building democracy also means taking on the absurd privileges and powers that have been granted to this country’s two primary gun institutions: law enforcement and the gun industry. Here are some suggestions:

    • Repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which grants unique legal immunity to firearms corporations.
    • Repeal the Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act, which enables current and retired cops to carry a concealed weapon anywhere in the country regardless of local laws.
    • End the gunocracy’s public health gag order by reversing the Dickey Amendment, which has blocked federal funding for research projects looking into gun violence.
    • End the myriad local practices that allow police officers to bring their service weapons home, despite their higher rates of domestic violence and suicide.

    Changing Gun Laws Only Works as Part of a Movement to Change Gun Culture

    After background checks, the most publicized demand of the gun control movement is a ban on “assault weapons.” While some find it self-evident that troubled youth shouldn’t be able to get their hands on military-style weapons, the details of how such a ban would work — and even what an “assault weapon” is — are quite complicated.

    Setting aside these important logistical questions, we should be clear that, in the absence of a major shift in cultural attitudes, any ban on firearms, gun modifications or ammunition will not lead to fewer guns and less violence. Without such a cultural shift, before the ban took effect, there would almost certainly be a massive surge in purchases, and afterward, there’s a strong likelihood that a vibrant and possibly dangerous illegal trade would develop. That’s because, like it or not, there is a massive demand for guns in the U.S., and history shows that prohibitions against goods with a strong demand generally do not work — especially when those laws are seen as illegitimate among wide swaths of the populace.

    Advocates of gun bans often point to the example of Australia, where sweeping gun reforms in 1996 — including a mandatory government buyback of semiautomatic weapons — led to a major reduction in gun deaths over the ensuing decade. But when it comes to gun culture, there is simply no comparing Australia — which at the time had a firearms ownership rate of under 7 percent — with the United States, where ownership rates have always been at least five times as high.

    None of this is to say that socialists should oppose any attempt to regulate the kinds of weaponry that are legally sold. But it does mean we should be clear that efforts to restrict access to certain types of weapons and ammo have to be accompanied by cultural changes of the type that have seen significant declines in harmful behaviors like drunk driving, bullying and cigarette smoking in recent decades.

    We need to greatly increase public awareness of the realities of gun violence, especially in its most common forms of suicide and domestic violence — neither of which fit popular images of guns as a heroic tool of self-defense. To do so will require a social movement that looks very different from the gun control lobby.

    A Movement Against Gun Violence Must Be Led by Those Most Affected by It

    In communities across the country there are domestic violence survivors, mental health advocates and community leaders in areas of high violence who have been working for decades to reduce gun violence. But all too often, their insights and experiences have been either ignored or barely factored into the politics of the gun control movement, especially in the decade since Michael Bloomberg’s philanthropic empire has come to dominate the discussion.

    As Micah Sifry has documented, Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund has used the power of its funding to co-opt more grassroots groups, steering them from protest to press conferences and narrowing the movement’s aims to background checks, which match’s Bloomberg’s longtime political vision of “better” government via policing and data collection.

    Because gun violence is so deeply connected with the structural inequalities of racial capitalism that Bloomberg would rather ignore, many victims of gun violence are also likely to be victims of the U.S. criminal legal and immigration systems — with felonies or deportation orders that make them “bad guys” in the eyes of the NICS. Perhaps, as Gary Younge argued a few years ago, this is one reason why the gun control movement seems to have so little to do with most victims of gun violence (mass shootings excepted).

    In the months after the horrific Parkland school shooting in 2018, the youth movement that built March for Our Lives offered an inspiring vision of what a movement against gun violence led by the most impacted could look like. Speakers like Edna Chavez from Los Angeles and Trevon Bosley from Chicago, each of whom had lost a brother to a street shooting, connected gun violence to mass policing and the disinvestment from Black and Brown communities.

    It was a glimpse of a different kind of movement against gun violence. We should imagine what it could look like to keep building in this direction, and include organizers from domestic violence shelters, cop-watch teams and migrants who have directly experienced the impact of guns in the hands of U.S. soldiers.

    I’ve made this my final point, but self-determination is the first principle of any political struggle. I don’t know what a national movement led by working-class survivors of gun violence would look like; perhaps it would reject most of my framework and proposals. But for now, the left can present some alternatives to the miserable gun debate that can expand on these very different frameworks that are too often ignored.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Progressive Candidates Endured Some National Losses, But Local Wins Offer Hope

    When Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign ended in the spring of 2020, observers wondered what would become of the many thousands of activists who had been part of the Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020. On the left, there were concerns that, without a central, unifying candidate, the energy that had amassed around progressive electoral organizing would dissipate. Now, two years beyond the end of the campaign and with midterm elections right around the corner, we can start to make some judgments about the state of progressive electoralism, post-Sanders.

    While there are fewer headline-grabbing victories than in the early days of the surge in electoral organizing, the movement to elect progressives at every level of government, in every corner of the country, is still alive and well. To get a clear picture, though, one has to look at the local, as well as the national level.

    This year, election results for progressive candidates at the national level have been a mixed bag, at best. This became evident early in 2022: in Texas, Jessica Cisneros failed, again, to defeat anti-abortion Democrat Henry Cuellar in her closely watched congressional primary (and subsequent runoff election). Meanwhile, in Texas’s 35th congressional district, progressive Greg Casar handily won his primary. (He’ll have an easy contest in November and will join Congress in January.) And so it continued throughout the year. In Pennsylvania’s 12th district, Summer Lee narrowly defeated the more moderate (and AIPAC-supported) Steve Irwin. Meanwhile, New York’s 10th congressional district was an absolute train wreck of personal ambition and competing progressive lobbies, allowing the establishment-friendly Daniel Goldman to secure a win with just 25 percent of the vote.

    The shaky performance among progressive congressional candidates has provided ample fodder for widespread despair. In fact, almost since the current phase of electoral progressivism began surging in the United States, in 2016, many of its opponents have been quick to identify harbingers of its impending burnout.

    Critics of electoral progressivism argue that the Trump years presented an anomalous backdrop against which the left could politic; or that leftists can only win in low-turnout elections; or that progressive candidates used the element of surprise to take down entrenched incumbents, a tactic that has produced diminishing returns as the establishment reorients around it. High-profile losses, like Cisneros in Texas or Nina Turner’s special election defeat, in 2021, seem to support these claims.

    At a more local level, though, the picture is different. In state and municipal elections across the country, progressive and openly socialist candidates have scored numerous victories in contested primary elections this year. What’s even more striking is that candidates are succeeding in districts reflecting a wide diversity of demographic configurations. These results fly in the face of the orthodoxy that left-wing candidates can only win in diverse, young, urban areas.

    In Delaware, a state known more for its corporate-friendly tax policy than its radical politics, four Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members won primaries for the state house and senate, with two other non-member DSA-endorsees winning state seats as well. In Colorado, considered a swing state until late in the last decade, two self-identified democratic socialists, one running on a police abolition platform, won races for the Colorado state house. In Wisconsin, two democratic socialists will enter the state house while others made gains on county councils, establishing a small but significant bloc of socialists elected in a state that Joe Biden won by just half a percentage point in 2020.

    These victories come as the terrain for progressive electoralists has gotten more complex over the last four years. In 2018 and 2020, progressives largely went on the offensive, aggressively pursuing vulnerable incumbents and channeling the power of a new generation of organizers eager to keep their recently developed electioneering skills sharp between the 2016 and 2020 Bernie Sanders campaigns.

    In 2022, however, progressives found themselves having to play defense for their incumbent candidates as much as they were going on the offensive. In Montgomery County, Maryland, DSA member and state delegate Gabriel Acevero faced opposition from his own district colleagues, as two delegates in his multicandidate district tried to replace Acevero with a third, more establishment-friendly delegate. (They failed; Acevero won reelection in July.)

    In New York City, newly elected Mayor Eric Adams leveraged his bully pulpit to back, among others, a challenger who sought to unseat State Sen. Jabari Brisport (that challenge was also unsuccessful). Members of “the Squad” in Congress — Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman — have also had to defend their seats against well-funded opponents whose backers would greatly prefer a representative less hostile to corporate interests.

    Personnel have become more scattered too, as the cadre of left electoralists, lacking a single candidate around whom they can rally, have devoted their time and labor to many smaller campaigns around the country. While these campaigns benefit from their individual expertise, it makes it harder for observers and analysts to figure out whether progressives are still conducting effective and winning campaigns.

    Taken together, though, the electoral results from this campaign season hardly paint a picture of a movement in decline. Rather, they suggest a maturing movement exiting its upstart phase and moving into a more established formation, struggling with many of the issues that attend formalized political structures in the U.S. This maturation separates the current progressive surge from previous left electoral efforts which have exhibited little continuity between election cycles. The fact that progressive campaigns and organizations have continued to mount electoral efforts amidst an increasingly forbidding landscape only further attests to a movement that is stabilizing and building for the long term.

    There are other important indicators of stabilization, too. In the first place, progressive elected officials are learning how to legislate and beginning to effect real policy changes at the state and local levels. In New York State, for example, progressive legislators, led by DSAers who were elected to state office in 2018 and 2020, have repeatedly introduced bills that would fundamentally alter the relationship between tenants and landlords in that state. This legislative effort is reminiscent of Congresswoman Cori Bush’s bold protest in 2021 which helped to extend an eviction moratorium that kept hundreds of thousands of people in their homes. Developing a legislative record, especially one that is based on shared progressive principles, is one of the most heartening signs of a movement that is learning to build for long-term success.

    Beyond that, progressive electoral efforts are helping to build a bench of elected officials. Candidates who are elected to local or state office today are set on a possible trajectory toward achieving higher offices and thus a more concrete grip on the levers of power. The U.S. right wing has long understood the importance of building a pipeline of electeds and standard-bearers, but centrist and center-left politicos who comprise the core Democratic Party leadership have apparently not internalized this lesson. (See, for example, the party’s inaction over the Biden succession question.) That progressives are attentive to this need is a testament to their vision.

    While progressives have seen fewer spectacular wins at the national level in 2022, left electoral momentum continues to propel candidates to victory at all levels, across the country. These modest, countrywide victories evince a movement in a state of evolution, led by activists looking toward the future.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Bloated Police Budgets Won’t Stop Sexual Violence

    On September 2, the United Nations voted unanimously to pass an international sexual assault survivors’ bill of rights, which many have touted as a feminist win. It’s true that survivors of sexual assault need protection, access to care, accountability, and justice. But this UN resolution isn’t likely to lead to those outcomes. The U.S.’ statement on the passage of this bill of rights clarifies what implementation would look like, including “the training of law enforcement and justice sector personnel in handling gender-based violence cases in a trauma-informed manner” as part of the “efforts to ensure that survivors of sexual and gender-based violence have access to survivor-centered justice.” As we already know, diverting funds to policing doesn’t keep survivors safe. It does just the opposite.

    The basis for the state’s line of thinking is an endorsement of carceral feminism. Diana Colavita, prison-industrial complex abolitionist and organizer with Survived and Punished NY, describes carceral feminism as “the belief that violence, including gender-based violence (like intimate partner violence and sexual assault), is an individual problem that can be solved on an individual basis in the criminal-punishment system, which carceral feminists believe is usually fair.” However, the carceral state is not feminist and cannot be reformed against its very nature into being feminist. This is because, at its core, the prison-industrial complex is inherently violent — particularly against the marginalized people its supporters purport that it protects. Colavita urges us to reject supposed interventions like so-called gender-responsive jails or trauma-informed police, which are just the state’s way of bastardizing concepts it refuses to truly understand. “Policing and incarceration are traumatic experiences,” says Colavita, and “no amount of trauma-informed training is going to make interactions with the police less traumatic.”

    This trauma is not a theoretical exercise. We have already seen, in practice, how these types of interventions are implemented. “I think to understand this UN resolution, you have to understand the U.S. federal legislation and subsequent state bills that the same people pushed for and that it is largely based around,” says Yves Tong Nguyen, a queer and disabled Vietnamese cultural worker and sex worker whose organizing home is with Survived and Punished NY and Red Canary Song. In 2016, then-President Barack Obama signed the Survivors’ Bill of Rights into law in the U.S. It’s easy to read a name like that and assume that its passage would be a good thing. But the rights that it codifies are not those that materially help survivors of sexual assault. Instead, Tong Nguyen says, its main purpose is “preserving rape kits and overhauling how sexual assaults are reported to encourage more survivors to report.” Because of this, police are often granted extra funding to their already bloated budgets to implement the overhauls in states that have passed comparable legislation. Most of the time, politicians and stakeholders consider giving police more resources a successful intervention, but even if you subscribe to the idea that law enforcement is meant to keep us safe, you’d see that they were doing a bad job.

    It’s not only that this reliance on policing and incarceration doesn’t help survivors of sexual violence; it actively harms them. Consider the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). Originally considered at the same time as the 1994 Crime Bill, VAWA enshrined many alleged protections into law. Among those is the compulsory arrest of accused abusers, which has led to a rise in dual arrests — a situation which occurs when the abuser says their victim was also abusing them or was the real abuser all along. In that scenario, the police are compelled to arrest them both, forcing a survivor of trauma to be further traumatized by arrest and potential jail time. VAWA also guarantees that the collection of evidence for rape kits is free, but the medical care a survivor might need due to an assault is not. In fact, uninsured survivors are saddled with medical bills often soaring over $3,000 for their required care after an assault. What good does collecting a rape kit free of charge do when people who were harmed can’t access free HIV prophylaxis, Plan B, therapy, or treatment for physical injuries? What good does the preservation of rape kits do if those same kits are being used years later to charge survivors with unrelated crimes?

    The state is also one of the worst perpetrators of sexual violence. “Police routinely sexually harass, assault, and extort people with impunity whether on duty or off duty, and corrections officers are also sexually violent toward incarcerated people,” says Tong Nguyen. They explain that this is because state-sanctioned sexual violence has historically been a tool of colonialism and white supremacy, which American policing is deeply rooted in.

    Criminalizing people for survival — and thus subjecting them to state violence — is also common. Colavita describes “survival” as “anything from defending oneself from violence, abuse, or assault, being forced to engage in criminalized acts by their abuser, engaging in criminalized acts to escape or avoid violence, among other things.” When the survivor doesn’t fit the perfect victim archetype, and is Black, Indigenous, Latinx, disabled, queer or trans, sex working, undocumented, or drug-using, they are more likely to be punished for surviving violence. Pieper Lewis was 15 when she killed the 37-year-old man who she said had raped her multiple times. After spending years in juvenile detention, Lewis was made to pay $150,000 to her alleged rapist’s family and $4,000 to the state and was also placed on probation.

    Lewis is not an anomaly. Siobhan Dingwall, member of #StandWithTracy and Survived and Punished NY, explains that Tracy McCarter was wrongfully arrested in March 2020 when she survived a domestic violence assault during which her abuser died. “Despite evidence that she was defending her life and was providing her abuser with medical care after immediately calling the police,” says Dingwall, “she was arrested and charged with murder.” She was held on Rikers Island for nearly seven months and has since been released with a GPS monitor. E-carceration has made it impossible for Tracy to work, access mental health treatment, or visit her family. The DA’s office, after filing a motion to reduce her charges from murder to manslaughter, now claims it cannot drop the charges. But Dingwall says that “they have total discretion over the case, and legal experts have said the same.” The campaign and fundraiser for her freedom are urgent as she could face a sentence of 25 years to life in prison. The situation has already been traumatic for her. As McCarter said in an interview with The Nation, “The state becomes the worst abuser you could ever have. They lie. They gaslight you. They physically and emotionally traumatize you. They are so powerful that my ability to leave my abuser no longer exists.”

    Because of the shortcomings and overt violence of the carceral state, any bill of rights that relies on it to protect survivors will not succeed. “There is no world where there are police and prisons and all survivors are safe. It is impossible,” Tong Nguyen says. “Abuse and sexual violence are rooted in power, and the only way to upend that is to upend systems of power and oppression, which police and prisons are built upon.”

    Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Queen’s Funeral in UK Set Off Harsh Crackdowns Against Critics of Monarchy

    Watching Queen Elizabeth’s funeral on Monday, I found myself experiencing two reactions simultaneously:

    As an advocate of republicanism in Britain — i.e., as someone who believes the monarchy should be abolished entirely and replaced by a republic with an elected head of state — I snorted in horror at the vast pomp and circumstance, at the enforced, ritualistic national mourning, at the millions of people lining the streets from London to Windsor to say goodbye to a person many had never met, at the medieval rituals, at the costumes, at the proclamation from the archbishop of Canterbury about how we were all swearing allegiance to the new king, the protector of the faith, member of the Order of Garters, and so on. What on earth does all of that ritual and assertion of hereditary, God-given, privilege have to say to us in a democratic age?

    But at the same time, I was also fascinated by the continuity represented by these centuries-old rituals and the glimpse into the past afforded by the pageantry. Those very elaborate scenes that so roused my anti-monarchical ire at the same time also served as bay windows into the vast span of British history. There was something mythical, and mystical, about it; one could, in such an orgy of pomp and circumstance, almost see how the Romans promoted their emperors to God status. The wrap-around media coverage seemingly showed a mortal woman being carefully transferred, through age-old incantations and rituals etched into the crevasses of time, over to the pantheon of the Gods.

    Unfortunately, in the Britain of 2022, only the latter of these two reactions would pass muster. Were the anti-monarchist in me let loose on the streets of the U.K., with a bullhorn and a placard, I would risk arrest. Were I to simply seek to get on with my everyday life, I’d instead have to navigate a warren of bizarre exhortations to grief.

    Over the past week, dozens of stories have surfaced of the extreme lengths to which institutions and individuals are going to profess their unstinting loyalty to, and grief on behalf of, the royal family.

    In an ostentatious show of this grief, food banks have shuttered — which will certainly hurt the hungry, but probably won’t do much to actually make the Queen’s grieving family feel better. Some supermarkets have toned down their checkout beeps, which will clearly make it more difficult for hard of hearing customers to keep track of what they are paying for, but will probably not really contribute to a sense of national healing after the death of the head of state. In a season of massive industrial action, postal workers and train drivers also pushed back their strikes. A number of bicycle racks, where people can park and lock their bikes, have closed for the two-week mourning period, and the organization British Cycle initially told its members they should abstain from bicycling on the day of the funeral, all of which will likely force more cyclists into driving cars instead but, again, probably won’t render whole the shattered psyche of the House of Windsor — unless, for reasons unknown, “The Firm,” as it is colloquially referred to, has a particular animus to two-wheeled modes of transportation.

    Sports events have been canceled; theaters have gone dark. Transport for London, which manages the capital city’s bus and underground train network, ordered street musicians to stop singing on transit property until after the funeral, presumably on the dubious assumption that commuters are so all-consumed in grieving that a few loose strains of Beatles or Dylan classics wafting through their local Tube station would terminally discombobulate them.

    Other stories include that of a holiday park chain telling guests they would have to vacate their hotel rooms on the day of the funeral. Apparently, according to this line of reasoning, vacation goers having fun would fatally undermine national solidarity.

    Even more worryingly than this nonsense, however, has been the law enforcement response. People expressing republican sentiments — either arguing aloud against the monarchy at public events or holding up protest signs protesting the passage of hereditary power from Queen Elizabeth to King Charles — have run afoul of two laws: the Public Order Act of 1986, which allows police to arrest people they deem as using threatening or abusive words, either out loud or on a sign, or talking in a way likely to cause harm or distress to others; and the recently passed Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which, most controversially, provides for the arrest of people causing “a serious annoyance.” Some of these protesters now face prison terms or fines for their activities.

    A heckler who shouted out that Prince Andrew — implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal — was a “sick old man,” was arrested and charged with breaching the peace.

    A barrister who wanted to test the limits of free speech journeyed to Westminster and held up a blank piece of cardboard in protest; the police questioned him but didn’t make an arrest. When he asked what they would do if he wrote “Not my king” on the cardboard, he was told he would be arrested.

    When a protester in Oxford called out “Who elected him?” when royal heralds came through the ancient university town to proclaim Charles the new king, he was promptly manhandled, handcuffed and thrown in the back of a police van.

    In Edinburgh, a man was arrested for holding up a sign reading “Fuck Imperialism. Abolish monarchy.” And the list goes on.

    There is an irony to all of this. The reason that so much of the world seems utterly preoccupied by the Queen’s death is that, in life, she did not seem to strive for autocracy and instead was associated in the public’s mind with a Britain characterized by democracy and free speech — the sort of place that could stand proud against the Nazis and their vicious totalitarian vision, or, more recently, offer safe haven to those fleeing Russian atrocities in Ukraine.

    How entirely bizarre, therefore, that as Elizabeth II’s body lay in state before she was interred, and as leaders of many of the world’s great democracies journeyed to London to pay tribute to her, the country over which she presided for 70 years indulged in rampant and gratuitous attacks on free speech and peaceful dissent.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pentagon Spending Drains the National Budget and Leaves a Big Carbon Bootprint

    On October 1st, the U.S. military will start spending the more than $800 billion Congress is going to provide it with in fiscal year 2023. And that whopping sum will just be the beginning. According to the calculations of Pentagon expert William Hartung, funding for various intelligence agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, and work on nuclear weaponry at the Energy Department will add another $600 billion to what you, the American taxpayer, will be spending on national security.

    That $1.4 trillion for a single year dwarfs Congress’s one-time provision of approximately $300 billion under the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) for what’s called “climate mitigation and adaptation.” And mind you, that sum is to be spent over a number of years. In contrast to the IRA, which was largely a climate bill (even if hardly the best version of one), this country’s military spending bills are distinctly anti-human, anti-climate, and anti-Earth. And count on this: Congress’s military appropriations will, in all too many ways, cancel out the benefits of its new climate spending.

    Here are just the three most obvious ways our military is an enemy of climate mitigation. First, it produces huge quantities of greenhouse gases, while wreaking other kinds of ecological havoc. Second, when the Pentagon does take climate change seriously, its attention is almost never focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions but on preparing militarily for a climate-changed world, including the coming crisis of migration and future climate-induced armed conflicts globally. And third, our war machine wastes hundreds of billions of dollars annually that should instead be spent on climate mitigation, along with other urgent climate-related needs.

    The Pentagon’s Carbon Bootprint

    The U.S. military is this globe’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum fuels. As a result, it produces greenhouse gas emissions equal to about 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. Were the Pentagon a country, those figures would place it just below Ireland and Finland in a ranking of national carbon emissions. Or put another way, our military surpasses the total national emissions of Bulgaria, Croatia, and Slovenia combined.

    A lot of those greenhouse gases flow from the construction, maintenance, and use of its 800 military bases and other facilities on 27 million acres across the United States and the world. The biggest source of emissions from actual military operations is undoubtedly the burning of jet fuel. A B-2 bomber, for instance, emits almost two tons of carbon dioxide when flying a mere 50 miles, while the Pentagon’s biggest boondoggle, the astronomically costly F-35 combat aircraft, will emit “only” one ton for every 50 miles it flies.

    Those figures come from “Military- and Conflict-Related Emissions,” a June 2022 report by the Perspectives Climate Group in Germany. In it, the authors express regret for the optimism they had exhibited two decades earlier when it came to the reduction of global military greenhouse gas emissions and the role of the military in experimenting with new, clean forms of energy:

    “In the process of us writing this report and looking at our article written 20 years ago, the initial notion of assessing military activities… as potential ‘engines of progress’ for novel renewable technologies was shattered by the Iraq War, followed by the horror of yet another large-scale ground war, this time in Europe… All our attention should be directed towards achieving the 1.5° target [of global temperature rise beyond the preindustrial level set at the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015]. If we fail in this endeavor, the repercussions will be more deadly than all conflicts we have witnessed in the last decades.”

    In March, the Defense Department announced that its proposed budget for fiscal year 2023 would include a measly $3.1 billion for “addressing the climate crisis.” That amounts to less than 0.4% of the department’s total spending and, as it happens, two-thirds of that little sliver of funding will go not to climate mitigation itself but to protecting military facilities and activities against the future impact of climate change. Worse yet, only a tiny portion of the remainder would go toward reducing the greenhouse-gas emissions or other environmental damage the armed forces itself will produce.

    In a 2021 Climate Adaptation Plan, the Pentagon claimed, however vaguely, that it was aiming for a future in which it could “operate under changing climate conditions, preserving operational capability, and enhancing the natural and manmade systems essential to the Department’s success.” It projected that “in worst-case scenarios, climate-change-related impacts could stress economic and social conditions that contribute to mass migration events or political crises, civil unrest, shifts in the regional balance of power, or even state failure. This may affect U.S. national interests directly or indirectly, and U.S. allies or partners may request U.S. assistance.”

    Sadly enough, however, as far as the Pentagon is concerned, an overheated world will only open up further opportunities for the military. In a classic case of projection, its analysts warn that “malign actors may try to exploit regional instability exacerbated by the impacts of climate change to gain influence or for political or military advantage.” (Of course, Americans would never act in such a manner since, by definition, the Pentagon is a benign actor, but will have to respond accordingly.)

    The CIA and other intelligence agencies seem to share the Pentagon’s vision of our hotter future as a growth opportunity. A 2021 climate risk assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) paid special attention to the globe’s fastest-warming region, the Arctic. Did it draw the intelligence community’s interest because of the need to prevent a meltdown of the planet’s ice caps if the Earth is to remain a livable place for humanity? What do you think?

    In fact, its authors write revealingly of the opportunities, militarily speaking, that such a scenario will open up as the Arctic melts:

    “Arctic and non-Arctic states almost certainly will increase their competitive activities as the region becomes more accessible because of warming temperatures and reduced ice. … Military activity is likely to increase as Arctic and non-Arctic states seek to protect their investments, exploit new maritime routes, and gain strategic advantages over rivals. The increased presence of China and other non-Arctic states very likely will amplify concerns among Arctic states as they perceive a challenge to their respective security and economic interests.”

    In other words, in an overheated future, a new “cold” war will no longer be restricted to what were once the more temperate parts of the planet.

    If, in climate change terms, the military worries about anything globally, it’s increased human migration from devastated areas like today’s flood-ridden Pakistan, and the conflicts that could come with it. In cold bureaucratese, that DNI report predicted that, as ever more of us (or rather, in national security state terms, of them) begin fleeing heat, droughts, floods, and tropical cyclones, “Displaced populations will increasingly demand changes to international refugee law to consider their claims and provide protection as climate migrants or refugees, and affected populations will fight for legal payouts for loss and damages resulting from climate effects.” Translation: We won’t pay climate reparations and we won’t pay to help keep other peoples’ home climates livable, but we’re more than willing to spend as much as it takes to block them from coming here, no matter the resulting humanitarian nightmares.

    Is It Finally Time to Defund War?

    Along with the harm caused by its outsized greenhouse gas emissions and its exploitation of climate chaos as an excuse for imperialism, the Pentagon wreaks terrible damage by soaking up trillions of dollars in government funds that should have gone to meet all-too-human needs, mitigate climate change, and repair the ecological damage the Pentagon itself has caused in its wars in this century.

    Months before Russia invaded Ukraine, ensuring that yet more greenhouse gases would be pumped into our atmosphere, a group of British scholars lamented the Biden administration’s enthusiasm for military funding. They wrote that, “rather than scaling back military spending to pay for urgent climate-related spending, initial budget requests for military appropriations are actually increasing even as some U.S. foreign adventures are supposedly coming to a close.” It’s pointless, they suggested, “to tinker around the edges of the U.S. war machine’s environmental impact.” The funds spent “procuring and distributing fuel across the U.S. empire could instead be spent as a peace dividend [that] includes significant technology transfer and no-strings-attached funding for adaptation and clean energy to those countries most vulnerable to climate change.”

    Washington could still easily afford that “peace dividend,” were it to begin cutting back on its military spending. And don’t forget that, at past climate summits, the rich nations of this planet pledged to send $100 billion annually to the poorest ones so that they could develop their renewable energy capacity, while preparing for and adapting to climate change. All too predictably, the deep-pocketed nations, including the U.S., have stonewalled on that pledge. And of course, as the recent unprecedented monsoon flooding of one-third of Pakistan — a country responsible for less than 1% of historic global greenhouse gases — suggests, it’s already remarkably late for that skimpy promise of a single hundred billion dollars; hundreds of billions per year are now needed. Mind you, Congress could easily divert enough from the Pentagon’s annual budget alone to cover its part of the global climate-reparations tab. And that should be only the start of a wholesale shift toward peacetime spending. No such luck, of course.

    As the National Priorities Project (NPP) has pointed out, increases in national security funding alone in 2022 could have gone a long way toward supporting Joe Biden’s expansive Build Back Better bill, which failed in Congress that year. That illustrates yet again how, as William Hartung put it, “almost anything the government wants to do other than preparing for or waging war involves a scramble for funding, while the Department of Defense gets virtually unlimited financial support,” often, in fact, more than it even asks for.

    The Democrats’ bill, which would have provided solid funding for renewable energy development, child care, health care, and help for economically stressed families was voted down in the Senate by all 50 Republicans and one Democrat (yes, that guy) who claimed that the country couldn’t afford the bill’s $170 billion-per-year price tag. However, in the six months that followed, as the NPP notes, Congress pushed through increases in military funding that added up to $143 billion — almost as much as Build Back Better would have cost per year!

    As Pentagon experts Hartung and Julia Gledhill commented recently, Congress is always pulling such stunts, sending more money to the Defense Department than it even requested. Imagine how much crucial federal action on all kinds of issues could be funded if Congress began deeply cutting, rather than inflating, the cash it shovels out for war and imperialism.

    Needed: A Merger of Movements

    Various versions of America’s antiwar movement have been trying to confront this country’s militarism since the days of the Vietnam War with minimal success. After all, Pentagon budgets, adjusted for inflation, are as high as ever. And, not coincidentally, greenhouse gas emissions from both the military and this society as a whole remain humongous. All these years later, the question remains: Can anything be done to impede this country’s money-devouring, carbon-spewing military juggernaut?

    For the past twenty years, CODEPINK, a women-led grassroots organization, has been one of the few national groups deeply involved in both the antiwar and climate movements. Jodie Evans, one of its cofounders, told me recently that she sees a need for “a whole new movement intersecting the antiwar movement with the climate movement.” In pursuit of that very goal, she said, CODEPINK has organized a project called Cut the Pentagon. Here’s how she describes it: “It’s a coalition of groups serving issues of people’s needs and the planet’s needs and the anti-war movement, because all of us have an interest in cutting the war machine. We launched it on September 12th last year, after 20 years of a ‘War on Terror’ that took $21 trillion of our tax money, to destroy the planet, to destroy the Middle East, to destroy our communities, to turn peacekeeping police into warmongering police.” Cut the Pentagon, says Evans, has “been doing actions in [Washington] D.C. pretty much nonstop since we launched it.”

    Sadly, in 2022, both the climate and antiwar struggles face the longest of odds, going up against this country’s most formidable strongholds of wealth and power. But CODEPINK is legendary for finding creative ways of getting in the face of the powerful interests it opposes and nonviolently upending business-as-usual. “As an activist for the last 50 some-odd years,” Evans says, “I always felt my job was to make power uncomfortable, and to disrupt it.” But since the start of the Covid pandemic, she adds, “Power is making us more uncomfortable than we are making it. It’s stronger and more weaponized than it has been before in my lifetime.”

    Among the hazards of this situation, she adds, social movements that manage to grow and become effective often find themselves coopted and, she adds, over the past two decades, “Too many of us got lazy… We thought ‘clicktivism’ creates change, but it doesn’t.” Regarding an education bill early in the Trump administration, “We had 200 million messages going into Congress from a vast coalition, and we lost. Then a month later, we had only 2,000 people, but we were right there in the halls of Congress and we saved Obamacare. Members of Congress don’t like being uncomfortable.”

    As the military-industrial complex and Earth-killing capitalism only seem to grow ever mightier, Evans and CODEPINK continue pushing for action in Washington. And recently, she believes, a window has been opening:

    “For the first time since the sixties and early seventies, it feels like a lot of people are seeing through the propaganda, really being willing to create new structures and new forms. We need to go where both our votes and our voices matter. Creating local change — that’s our work. Our divest-from-war campaigns are all local. Folks who care about the planet need to figure out how do we make power uncomfortable… It’s not a fight of words. It’s a fight of being.”

    The major crises we now face are so deeply entangled that perhaps grassroots efforts to face them might, in the end, coalesce. The question remains: From the neighborhood to the nation, could movements for climate mitigation and justice, Indigenous sovereignty, Black lives, economic democracy, and, crucially, an end to the American form of militarism merge into a single collective wave? Our future may depend on it.

  • States Need Constitutional Amendments to Protect Abortion From Right-Wing Judges

    Since the right-wing majority of the Supreme Court held in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that the U.S. Constitution does not protect the right to abortion, many states have restricted or outright banned the procedure. But some states, like California, are endeavoring to enshrine the right to abortion in their constitutions. Although the California Supreme Court has declared that the state constitution’s right to privacy protects abortion, that safeguard remains ephemeral.

    In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court established in Roe v. Wade that abortion is a fundamental right and a state could not prohibit it before fetal viability (able to live outside the womb). Just as the U.S. Supreme Court retracted the abortion right when conservatives attained a majority, California’s Supreme Court could likewise rescind the right to abortion if the court’s membership were to shift to the right.

    In August, Kansas voters rejected an amendment that would have explicitly excluded the right to abortion from its constitution.

    On November 8, voters in California, Michigan and Vermont will decide whether to amend their state constitutions to enshrine the right to abortion. People in Kentucky, on the other hand, will vote on an amendment that specifically excludes the right to abortion from constitutional protection.

    Enumerated and Unenumerated Constitutional Rights

    The U.S. Constitution does not specifically mention abortion as a protected right. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and the right to a fair trial are examples of enumerated rights because they are listed in the Constitution. But the rights to travel, vote, use contraception, engage in same-sex sexual conduct and same-sex marriage, although not enumerated in the Constitution, have been held to be implied constitutional rights.

    In Roe, the Supreme Court grounded the right to abortion in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause that protects personal liberty. The Roe court ruled that it prohibits government interference in personal decisions about contraception, marriage, procreation, familial relationships, education and child-rearing.

    But in Dobbs, Samuel Alito, joined by Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, wrote that the Constitution contains no reference to abortion and there is no constitutional provision that implicitly guarantees it. In order to be protected by the Due Process Clause, Alito wrote, a right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” The majority concluded that there is no liberty interest because the law didn’t protect the right to abortion in the 19th century.

    In essence, Dobbs left it up to the states to permit, restrict or outlaw abortion.

    At least nine states provide a right to abortion in their state constitutions as interpreted by court rulings. They include Alaska, California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana and New Jersey. None contain an explicit constitutional right to abortion but courts have implied the right by construing provisions that protect privacy, liberty and equality.

    Abortion Is an Unenumerated Right in the California Constitution

    Abortion is legal in California before fetal viability, and after viability when necessary to protect the life or health of the mother. In 1969, the California Supreme Court ruled in People v. Belous that women have “[constitutional] rights to life and to choose whether to bear children.” The court stated that “the fundamental right of the woman to choose whether to bear children follows from the Supreme Court’s and this court’s repeated acknowledgment of a ‘right of privacy’ or ‘liberty’ in matters related to marriage, family, and sex.”

    In 1972, California voters approved Proposition 11, the Constitutional Right to Privacy Amendment, which made privacy an inalienable right in the California Constitution.

    In 1981, the California Supreme Court held in Committee to Defend Reproductive Rights v. Myers that “the protection afforded the woman’s right of procreative choice as an aspect of the right of privacy under the explicit provisions of our Constitution is at least as broad as that described in Roe v. Wade. Consequently, we further conclude that the asserted state’s interest in protecting a nonviable fetus is subordinate to the woman’s right of privacy.”

    The California State Legislature declared in the 2002 Reproductive Privacy Act that women have a “fundamental right to choose to bear a child or to choose and to obtain an abortion.”

    But in spite of judicial and legislative protections, the California Constitution does not explicitly contain the right to abortion. A future California Supreme Court could overrule Myers and hold that the constitutional right to privacy does not extend to abortion.

    Thus, California voters will decide whether to amend their state constitution to clearly protect abortion. Proposition 1 says: “The state shall not deny or interfere with an individual’s reproductive freedom in their most intimate decisions, which includes their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives.” Proposition 1 states that the rights to abortion and contraceptives are specifically grounded in the California Constitution’s right to privacy and right to not be denied equal protection.

    Although Alito specified that the Dobbs ruling applies only to abortion, the court’s holding is based on the same precedents as the rights to contraception, same-sex sexual conduct and same-sex marriage. California’s Proposition 1 would also enshrine the right to contraception in the state constitution.

    A recent poll showed that 71 percent of registered California voters plan to vote for Proposition 1.

    On June 27, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued Executive Order N-12-22, in which he proclaimed that all state agencies are prohibited from providing patient medical records relating to reproductive health care services for any investigation. Newsom’s order also says that his office will not honor arrest warrants from other states for individuals charged with criminal offenses for receipt of or assistance with reproductive health care services.

    Ballot Measure Would Enshrine Right to Reproductive Freedom in Michigan Constitution

    Michiganders will decide whether to amend their constitution to provide a right to reproductive freedom, which is defined in Proposal 3 as “the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care.” The ballot measure states that Michigan can regulate abortion after fetal viability but cannot prohibit the use of abortion to “protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual,” as determined by the attending health care professional. Proposition 3 would also prevent the state from prosecuting anyone for having an abortion or miscarriage or from prosecuting an individual who assists a pregnant person in “exercising rights established by this amendment.”

    “Michigan is in a uniquely precarious position at this time in history,” prominent Detroit civil rights attorney Julie Hurwitz told Truthout. A 1931 criminal statute prohibiting abortion in Michigan has recently been declared unconstitutional by the Michigan Supreme Court. The court held that abortion is protected under the Michigan Constitution’s due process clause, as an implied right to bodily integrity. But the due process right was only recognized by the Michigan Supreme Court in 2021, in the context of the Flint water crisis.

    “These court rulings, however, are subject to further appellate review and to the realities of the intensely political nature of our judicial system,” Hurwitz said. “There is currently a Democratic majority on the court, but this could change at any time, which would open the door to a future Republican majority doing exactly what the U.S. Supreme Court just did with Roe v. Wade, in the infamous Dobbs decision.”

    Hurwitz added, “The historic success of the petition drive to get this constitutional amendment on the ballot — over 750,000 petition signatures, despite concerted efforts to block it — presents a unique opportunity to ensure that this fundamental right will no longer be able to be threatened in the State of Michigan.”

    A recent poll shows 67 percent of likely voters in Michigan support Proposition 3.

    Vermonters Will Decide Whether to Create a Constitutional Right to Personal Reproductive Autonomy

    Abortion during all stages of pregnancy is legal in Vermont. In 2019, the Vermont State Legislature enacted a law that says, “The State of Vermont recognizes the fundamental right of every individual who becomes pregnant to choose to carry a pregnancy to term, to give birth to a child, or to have an abortion.”

    However, like California and Michigan, the Vermont Constitution doesn’t explicitly guarantee the right to abortion.

    Vermont voters will decide whether to amend their state constitution to create a constitutional right to personal reproductive privacy that protects “every person’s right to make their own reproductive decisions.” If adopted, the Reproductive Liberty Amendment would amend Article 22 to provide: “That an individual’s right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one’s own life course and shall not be denied or infringed unless justified by a compelling State interest achieved by the least restrictive means.”

    More than 70 percent of Vermonters support the amendment.

    States With Constitutional Amendments That Say They Do Not Protect Abortion

    Four states — Tennessee, Alabama, West Virginia and Louisiana — have constitutional amendments declaring that their constitutions do not protect the right to abortion. Arkansas has a constitutional amendment that states, “The policy of Arkansas is to protect the life of every unborn child from conception until birth, to the extent permitted by the Federal Constitution.”

    Kentucky Is Poised to Outlaw Abortion in Its Constitution

    On August 2, the Kentucky Court of Appeals reinstated a ban on abortion. On August 18, the Kentucky Supreme Court ordered that the abortion ban would remain in place while it reviews arguments by clinics that perform abortions which are challenging two state laws.

    In 2019, the Kentucky State Legislature enacted a law prohibiting all abortions in the state if the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe. It would make performing an abortion a felony carrying five years in prison.

    Kentucky voters will now decide whether to adopt Amendment 2, which would amend the Kentucky Constitution to say that it does not “secure or protect a right” to abortion.

    Amendment 2 reads: “Are you in favor of amending the Constitution of Kentucky by creating a new Section of the Constitution to be numbered Section 26A to state as follows: To protect human life, nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion?”

    The only way to ensure the right to abortion is by a state constitutional amendment. We cannot rely on progressive state supreme courts to interpret their constitutions as implicitly protecting abortion. Subsequent courts, legislative enactments and voter initiatives can undo what the state supreme court has done.

    “This is why it is so critically important for the right to abortion to be explicitly articulated in the language of our state constitution,” Michigan attorney Hurwitz said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Democrats’ Failure to Embrace the Progressive Grassroots Could Spell Their Doom

    The Trump/MAGA 2022 blitzkrieg cited by President Joe Biden and so many others is for sure a multipronged attack with a clear goal — to obliterate democracy itself.

    It’s now been two years since Steve Bannon vowed to “take over elections” and overthrow the “Deep State” — a government run by elected officials and civil servants dedicated to serving the public.

    The oft-indicted Bannon instead has summoned a fascistic base that’s “hit the ground running,” demanding an iron fisted bureaucracy run by party loyalists bowing to Donald Trump’s every command. This reality is apparent in Bannon’s “precinct strategy,” in which he is pushing right-wing activists into positions of power at election boards and poll worker outposts throughout the U.S., where they can directly impact who can vote and how those votes are counted.

    The dictatorial game plan embraces a wider range of attacks on our core institutions and democratic assumptions than even the president might imagine.

    And there’s only one way to beat it: grassroots organizing from the progressive left.

    Let’s count the ways the right wing is attacking democracy:

    • On January 6, 2021, the Trump/Bannon minions made clear that their “Stop the Steal” mob loves violence and sees outright murder as a legitimate way to trash an electoral outcome they can’t handle. “Just understand this: All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” Bannon said on his “War Room” podcast the night before. “It’s going to be moving. It’s going to be quick.” Also: “We’re converging on a point of attack,” he said in a different January 5 rant. “It’s coming to a head tomorrow.”
    • Gerrymandered MAGA state legislatures are now trashing the most directly democratic feature of American governance, the popular referendum, making it clear the public will means nothing to their “Christian” view of how we all must live.
    • The people of Florida twice voted to let people formerly convicted of felonies to vote. But following 20 arrests made in August by his new “Office of Election Crimes and Security,” Gov. Ron DeSantis has made it clear he will prevent eligible citizens (virtually all of them Black) from casting ballots, even after the state assured them they could vote, as per the mandate of the public referenda.
    • Ohio Republicans have shredded two state-wide referenda mandating un-gerrymandered districts while defying the state supreme court, which ordered the legislature to produce fair maps that conformed to the demands of the voters to be used in the upcoming 2020 midterms. With blatant contempt for the law and the will of the people, they’ve instead imposed maps on this fall’s election that are likely to unfairly sway a number of congressional seats while preserving a fascist supermajority in the state legislature. Similar things are happening in North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Texas, Arizona and elsewhere.
    • Multiple red states are also defying referenda on abortion, voting rights, and other core democracy issues, clearly signaling that the people’s mandates mean nothing to them.
    • GOP gerrymandering was enshrined in the 2010 elections, which were bought by the Koch Brothers and ignored by Obama Democrats, who failed to fight back. Thus far-right legislatures have metastasized throughout states that used to belong to the Confederacy, the “heartland,” Arizona, and elsewhere. These red legislatures are now spreading anti-democracy statutes aimed at enshrining dictatorial state-based regimes.
    • According to the Brennan Center, dozens of those legislatures have enacted scores of restrictions denying the right to vote and to have those votes counted, especially if cast by young citizens of color.
    • Those dictates include Georgia’s ban on giving food and water to people waiting in line to vote, as well as widespread attacks on the ability of people of youth and color to get ballots, to vote at all, to have access to drop boxes, to vote by mail, and many other simple mechanisms that make democracy work.
    • As Election Day approaches, legions of election-denying acolytes of Bannon and Trump are filling local election board posts that will let them intimidate eligible citizens and deny ballots to those they may not like. According to the Brennan Center, election workers have been facing death threats, “doxing” (publicization of their home addresses aimed to fuel harassment), outright violence and forced removals from their positions as part of an overall right-wing campaign to fulfill Bannon’s call to “take over elections.”
    • By severely restricting poll access, eliminating early voting, erasing voting stations and overall making it far harder for working people to vote, the MAGA autocrats impose de facto poll taxes on those who cannot afford to spend whole days waiting to cast a ballot… often only to face a Bannonite bully waiting to pitch it in a waste basket.
    • MAGA bullies have weaponized the death threat — in person, by phone, in writing — to terrorize election officials, school board members, teachers, FBI agents, district attorneys (and their families), destroying vital nodes of election protection.
    • By guaranteeing endless voting station foul-ups and needless delays, Bannonite poll workers now have the dangerous ability to impose impossibly long waits on citizens vulnerable to discrimination and disenfranchisement, especially as armed militias threaten them as they wait in long lines… where they will also be denied food and water.
    • In the now-pending Moore v. Harper case, the rightist U.S. Supreme Court could well seek to use the bogus “Independent Legislature Theory” to let gerrymandered MAGA/Trump democracy-hating state legislatures seize control of the Electoral College and usurp the public’s right to choose the next president.
    • Moore would enshrine for 2024 the Trump strategy of flooding Congress with fake state electors chosen by gerrymandered legislators to make Trump, DeSantis, or someone like them dictator for life, no matter who the voting public actually chooses.
    • The 2022 and 2024 elections will also be swarmed with fake “recounts” like those in Arizona in the 2020 election, challenging any pro-democracy outcomes MAGA forces dislike.

    The big-picture reality is that all these desperate MAGA attempts to kill democracy are a backlash against demographic trends that could spell disaster for Republicans down the road if the mechanisms of U.S. democracy are left intact.

    The Supreme Court overturn of Roe v. Wade — which gave a sudden rush of power to gerrymandered legislatures — has mobilized the nation’s voting majority in ways that have already overwhelmed right-wing constituencies in Kansas and numerous once-conservative congressional districts.

    More than half the U.S. electorate is female. So is the voting public born after 1981. Our diverse multiracial LGBTQ-friendly Millennial/Zoomer constituency is so deeply attached to democracy that in 2020 it voted more than 3-2 to oust Trump. Based on Pew Research findings, among others, the numbers in 2022 and 2024 are projected to be even more progressive.

    The rise of the Millennial/Zoomers is accompanied by a drastic drop in right-wing Evangelism and a “Christian” faith rooted in racial bigotry, sexual puritanism and Orwellian malaise.

    Bannon and his MAGA minions are well aware that the rise of a diverse, tolerant and increasingly progressive voting constituency in this country means their hate-based movement is doomed.

    Trump’s 2020 losing margin was in fact the third largest for any incumbent in U.S. history (behind only Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter). The January 6 hearings, the flood of crony indictments, even Ukraine’s stunning resistance, all portend a deeply human revulsion against the kinds of dictatorial regimes made all too real by the likes of Trump and Putin.

    But the lead-up to 2022 also makes clear that corporate Democratic “business as usual” will not be sufficient to stop an armed, multilayered, anti-democratic coup.

    So, what will?

    On January 5, 2021 — the day before the Capital coup attempt — progressive democracy scored one of U.S. history’s most improbable electoral victories.

    Guided by the Atlanta NAACP’s Ray McClendon and the computerized strategizing of Andrea Miller’s Center for Common Ground, grassroots campaigners in Georgia — mostly operating outside the Democratic Party — elected to the U.S. Senate the Black preacher Raphael Warnock and a young Jewish filmmaker named Jon Ossof.

    The earth-shattering dual runoff victories gave the Democrats their vital 50-50 Upper House tie.

    But it would not have happened had the corporate party run its usual media-based campaign without the massive grassroots upheaval coordinated by Miller and McClendon. By all accounts, decisive turnouts in Democratic strongholds of youth and color made the difference.

    Steve Bannon is well aware of all that. As evidenced by his “War Room” podcasts, he has been consistently demanding door-to-door “relational campaigning,” for establishing party storefronts in key right-wing strongholds, for a “boots-on-the-ground” takeover of the electoral apparatus, starting with poll workers, election board officials, secretaries of state.

    The corporate Democrats’ ongoing attacks against young progressive candidates have underscored their aversion to necessary change, even in the face of overt fascism. Millions of donor dollars still sink into endless TV advertising that does less and less to shape electoral outcomes.

    Despite a wave of angry activism among Millennial/Zoomers demanding the party move left, there’s little evidence its corporate gerontocracy is ready to embrace the generational wave that must happen if the Bannonites are to be defeated.

    The Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade has aroused an army of angry American women and trans people.

    But millions of pro-choice voters now marching toward the polls could be stopped in their tracks if the Bannonite take-over of the voting apparatus is not neutralized.

    And the victories in those two Georgia Senate races aren’t likely to repeat unless the Democrats embrace the grassroots campaigning that opens the only sure route to saving our democracy.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump’s Hiding of Information Isn’t “Unprecedented.” It’s a Horrifying Norm.

    Thanks to Donald Trump, secrecy is big news these days. However, as political pundits and legal experts race to expose the layers of document-related misdeeds previously buried at his Mar-a-Lago estate, one overlooked reality looms large: despite all the coverage of the thousands of documents Trump took with him when he left the White House, there’s been next to no acknowledgment that such a refusal to share information has been part and parcel of the Washington scene for far longer than the current moment.

    The hiding of information by the former president, repeatedly described as “unprecedented” behavior, is actually part of a continuum of withholding that’s been growing at a striking pace for decades. By the time Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, the stage had long been set for removing information from the public record in an alarmingly broad fashion, a pattern that he would take to new levels.

    The “Secrecy President”

    As recent history’s exhibit number one, this country’s global war on terror, launched soon after the 9/11 attacks, was largely defined and enabled by the withholding of information — including secret memos, hidden authorizations, and the use of covert methods. During President George W. Bush’s first term in office, government lawyers and officials regularly withheld information about their actions and documents related to them from public view, both at home and abroad.

    Those officials, for instance, legalized the brutal interrogations of war-on-terror prisoners, while conveniently replacing the word “torture” with the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques” and so surreptitiously evading a longstanding legal ban on the practice. The CIA then secretly utilized those medieval techniques at “black sites” around the world where its agents held suspected terrorists. It later destroyed the tapes made of those interrogations, erasing the evidence of what its agents had done. On the home front, in a similarly secretive fashion, unknown to members of Congress as well as the general public, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to set up an elaborate and far-reaching program of warrantless surveillance on Americans and others inside the United States.

    Consider that the launching of an era of enhanced secrecy techniques. No wonder Bush earned the moniker of the “secrecy president.” Only weeks after the 9/11 attacks, for instance, he put in place strict guidelines about who could brief Congress on classified matters, while instituting new, lower standards for transparency. He even issued a signing statement rebuking Congress for requiring reports “in written form” on “significant anticipated intelligence activities or significant intelligence failure.” To emphasize his sense of righteousness in defying calls for information, he insisted on the “president’s constitutional authority to… withhold information” in cases of foreign relations and national security. In a parallel fashion, his administration put new regulations in place limiting the release of information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

    President Obama also withheld information when it came to war-on-terror efforts. Notably, his administration shrouded in secrecy the use of armed drones to target and kill suspected terrorists (and civilians) in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Official reports omitted reliable data about who was killed, where the killings had taken place, or the number of civilian casualties. As the American Civil Liberties Union concluded, administration reporting on civilian harm fell “far short of the standards for transparency and accountability needed to ensure that the government’s targeted killing program is lawful under domestic and international law.”

    And well beyond the war-on-terror context, the claim to secrecy has become a government default mechanism. Tellingly, the number of classified documents soared to unimaginable heights in those years. As the National Archives reports, in 2012, documents with classified markings — including “top secret,” “secret,” and “confidential” — reached a staggering 95 million. And while the overall numbers had declined by 2017, the extent of government classification then and now remains alarming.

    Erasing the Record Before It’s Created

    President Trump’s document theft should be understood, then, as just another piece of the secrecy matrix.

    Despite his claim — outrageous, but perhaps no more than so many other claims he made — to being the “most transparent” president ever, he turned out to be a stickler for withholding information on numerous fronts. Taking the war-on-terror behavioral patterns of his predecessors to heart, he expanded the information vacuum well beyond the sphere of war and national security to the purely political and personal realms. As a start, he refused to testify in the Mueller investigation into the 2016 presidential election. On a more personal note, he also filed suit to keep his tax records secret from Congress.

    In fact, during his time in office, Trump virtually transformed the very exercise of withholding information. In place of secrecy in the form of classification, he developed a strategy of preventing documents and records from even being created in the first place.

    Three months into his presidency, Trump announced that the White House would cease to disclose its visitor logs, citing the supposed risk to both national security and presidential privacy. In addition to hiding the names of those with whom he met, specific high-level meetings took place in an unrecorded fashion so that even the members of his cabinet, no less the public, would never know about them.

    As former National Security Advisor John Bolton and others have attested, when it came to meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump even prohibited note-taking. In at least five such meetings over the course of his first two years in office, he consistently excluded White House officials and members of the State Department. On at least one occasion, he even confiscated notes his interpreter took to ensure that there would be no record.

    Congress, too, was forbidden access to information under Trump. Lawyers in the Department of Justice (DOJ) drafted memos hardening policies against complying with congressional requests for information in what former DOJ lawyer Annie Owens has described as “a policy that approached outright refusal” to share information. In addition, the Trump administration was lax or even dismissive when it came to compliance with the production of required reports on national security matters. Note as well the reversal of policies aimed at transparency, as in the decision to reverse an Obama era policy of making public the number of nuclear weapons the U.S. possessed.

    But don’t just blame Donald Trump. Among the most recent examples of erasing evidence, it’s become clear that the Secret Service deleted the text messages of its agents around the president from the day before and the day of the January 6th insurrection. So, too, the phone records of several top Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were wiped clean when they left office in accordance with directives established early in the Trump presidency. Similarly, the phone records of top Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security officials were scrapped. In other words, recent reports on the way Trump regularly shredded documents, flushed them down the White House toilet, and generally withheld presidential papers — even classified documents, as revealed during the Mar-a-Lago search — were of a piece with a larger disdain on the part of both the president and a number of his top officials for sharing information.

    Erasing the record in one fashion or another became the Trump administration’s default setting, variations on a theme hammered out by his predecessors and taken to new levels on his watch.

    A Perpetual Right to Secrecy?

    Admittedly, before Trump arrived on the scene, there were some efforts to reverse this pattern, but in the long run they proved anemic. Barack Obama arrived at the White House in January 2009 acknowledging the harm caused by excessive government secrecy. Emphasizing transparency’s importance for accountability, informed public debate, and establishing trust in government, the new president issued an executive order on his first full day in office emphasizing the importance of “transparency and open government” and pledging to create “an unprecedented level of openness in government.”

    Nearly a year later, he followed up with another executive order setting out a series of reforms aimed at widening the parameters for information-sharing. That order tightened guidelines around classification and broadened the possibilities for declassifying information. “Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their government,” it read. Six years later, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper produced a report on the “principles of Intelligence transparency for the intelligence community” and a “transparency implementation plan” that again aimed at clarifying the limits, as well as the purposes, of secrecy.

    And Obama’s efforts did indeed make some headway. As Steven Aftergood, former director of the Federation of American Scientists, concluded, “The Obama administration broke down longstanding barriers to public access and opened up previously inaccessible records of enormous importance and value.” Among other things, Aftergood reported, Obama “declassified the current size of the U.S. nuclear arms arsenal for the first time ever,” as well as thousands of the president’s daily briefs, and established a National Declassification Center.

    Still, in the end, the progress proved disappointing. As Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan put it, the Obama administration’s record on transparency was among “the most secretive” in our history. She also castigated the president’s team for “setting new records for stonewalling or rejecting Freedom of Information Requests.” As an Associated Press analysis of federal data verified, the Obama administration did indeed set records in some years when it came to not granting those FOIA requests.

    Executive distaste for sharing information is certainly nothing new and has often been linked, as during the war on terror, to misrepresentations, misdeeds, and outright deceit. After all, half a century ago, the administration of President Richard Nixon (of Watergate fame) defended the right to withhold information from the public as an effective way of covering up the American role in Vietnam. Those withheld materials, eventually released by the New York Times, showed that, over the course of four administrations, the national security state had misled the public about what the U.S. was doing in Vietnam, including hiding the secret bombing of neighboring Cambodia and Laos.

    Still, let’s recognize what Donald Trump has, in fact, done. Though no longer president, he’s now taken the withholding of government information well beyond the borders of the government itself and deep into his private realm. In doing so, he’s set a dangerous precedent, one that brought the FBI to his doorstep (after months of attempts to access the documents in less intrusive ways). The challenge now is to address not just Trump’s clumsy efforts to unilaterally privatize a government practice, but the systemic overreach officials have relied on for decades to withhold staggering amounts of information from the public.

    The Biden administration is alert to this issue. Notably, President Biden reversed several of Trump’s classification decisions, including his policy of not reporting the number of American nuclear weapons. More systematically, the National Security Council recently launched an effort aimed at revising the nation’s unwieldy classification system, while Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has stated her intention to review the excessive classification of government documents.

    In a 2022 letter to Congress, Haines pointed to the downside of a government that refuses to share information. “It is my view,” she wrote, “that deficiencies in the current classification system undermine our national security, as well as critical democratic objectives, by impeding our ability to share information in a timely manner, be that sharing with our intelligence partners, our oversight bodies, or, when appropriate, with the general public.”

    True to her word, in the three months following that statement of allegiance to transparency, Haines has released a steady flow of material on controversial topics, including unclassified reports on everything from the origins of Covid to climate change to an assessment of the “Saudi government’s role in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.”

    Still, despite such efforts, the powers that be are arguably being hoisted on their own petard. After all, Donald Trump followed in the wake of his predecessors in sanctioning expansive secrecy, then made it a be-all and end-all of his presidency, and now claims that it’s part of his rights as a former president and private citizen. As the head of a political movement, now out of office, he’s done the once unthinkable by claiming that the veil of secrecy, the right to decide what should be known and who should know it, is his in perpetuity.

    The horror of his claim to untethered secret authority — no wonder some of his MAGA followers refer to him as their “god-emperor” — violates the very idea that a democracy is a pact between individual citizens and elected officials. The valid response to the holding of documents at Mar-a-Lago shouldn’t just be reclaiming them for the public record or even the clear demarcation of the law as it applies to a private citizen as opposed to a president (though both are essential). What’s needed is a full-throated demand that policies of secrecy, allowed to expand exponentially in this century without accountability or transparency, are destructive of democracy and should be ended.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Why Is the UN Welcoming Philippine Dictator’s Son to Power?

    Fifty years to the day since a dictator declared martial law in the Philippines, the international community is poised to welcome his son into power with open arms. The United Nations has invited newly inaugurated Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to speak at the UN General Assembly on September 20. The invitation coincides with the 50th anniversary of the declaration of martial law in the Philippines by his father, Ferdinand Marcos Sr.

    September 21, 1972, marked the beginning of a 14-year period of corruption, tyranny and state violence that left over 70,000 Filipinos jailed, 34,000 tortured and 3,240 murdered. It also left the Marcos family $10 billion richer.

    Despite an outstanding $353 million contempt order related to human rights abuses committed under his family’s previous rule and a presidential campaign marred by claims of electoral fraud, violence and misinformation, Ferdinand “Bong Bong” Marcos Jr. will be speaking to the international community on issues of inequality, poverty and armed conflict — issues he has no right to speak about. The UN General Assembly must not be swayed by the Marcos family’s attempts to obfuscate their crimes against the Filipino people. Anything less is a gross hypocrisy from a body that supposedly “promotes the realization of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all.”

    State violence against the Filipino people is not a problem of the distant past. Americans may be familiar with former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s (2016-2022) bloody “war on drugs.” In a thinly veiled effort to crack down on dissent, state forces and their allies targeted activists and critics, resulting in as many as 30,000 extrajudicial killings of labor leaders, land defenders, and the poor and vulnerable. Now, the former president’s daughter, Sara Duterte, is Marcos Jr.’s vice president. This is not a coincidence. The Marcos-Duterte alliance is the work of a decades-long project by the Marcos dynasty and its cronies to restore itself to power. Inviting Marcos Jr. to the UN only further disregards the killings and indignities suffered under both Marcos Sr. and former President Duterte.

    Make no mistake: Marcos Jr.’s regime is overseeing a continuation of the practices of his predecessors. His regime lends its full support to practices widely condemned by international human rights groups. These include the violent and anti-democratic tactics of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict and the Anti-Terror Law, which in tandem have resulted in the intimidation and arrest of any opposition, including sitting senators, journalists and Indigenous school teachers. In 2020, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights itself reported “systematic human rights violations, including killings and arbitrary detention, persistent impunity and the vilification of dissent.” Now, Marcos Jr. doubles down on these same cruel, repressive methods. Human rights atrocities in the Philippines will worsen as the government continues to dodge accountability.

    The United States and the international community will remain complicit with the Marcos-Duterte regime so long as the world continues to legitimize the tyranny of these political dynasties and the U.S. government continues to fuel the mechanisms of terror with over $550 million in military aid and $2 billion in arms sales. But this cycle of impunity need not continue. Last year, Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pennsylvania) introduced the Philippine Human Rights Act (PHRA) in an effort to suspend security assistance to the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police until the human rights situation improves.

    Marcos Jr.’s speech at the United Nations will represent a cruel hypocrisy to the many Filipinos who have suffered under the Marcos and Duterte regimes. The international community should not welcome Marcos Jr. into power. Congress must pass the PHRA, the International Criminal Court must proceed with its inquiry into extrajudicial killings during the Duterte administration, and the United Nations must commit to investigating the human rights abuses of the new Marcos regime. It’s high time the global community take substantial steps towards restitution for the Filipino people and begin to hold the Marcoses and Dutertes accountable for their crimes.

    The Northeast Coalition to Advance Genuine Democracy in the Philippines will protest and march from the Philippine Consulate (556 5th Avenue) to the United Nations on Tuesday, September 20, at 12 pm.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Meet the Congress Members Trading Defense Stocks While Shaping Military Policy

    The New York Times reported this week that 97 members of Congress “bought or sold stocks, bonds, or other financial assets that intersected with their congressional work or reported similar transactions by their spouse or a dependent child” between 2019 and 2021. With more than 3,700 such trades in those three years alone, the investigation reveals potential conflicts of interest in nearly every area of policymaking.

    Defense policy is no different. At least 25 members sat on committees that shape national security policy while simultaneously trading financial assets in companies that could create competing interests with their work, such as defense stock. With a near-even party split, Democrats and Republicans may have found a rare instance of common ground.

    The majority of these members sat on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees — the committees responsible for the budget and oversight of the Department of Defense.

    The list includes the former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who bought and sold shares of technology companies as they fought over a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon, which eventually went to Microsoft. When the Pentagon later decided to cancel the contract, House Armed Services Committee member Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) sold up to $250,000 worth of Microsoft stock two weeks before it was publically announced. Fallon served on the subcommittee which oversaw the deal, though a spokesperson said at the time that he had “absolutely no prior knowledge the Pentagon intended to cancel” the contract.

    It also includes Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who reported more trades than any other member of Congress. Though they were “made by trusts in the name of his wife and young children,” these trades spanned all of the top five weapons contractors — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman — which could conflict with his role as a member of the House Armed Services Committee. Khanna has been an opponent of overspending on the Pentagon, an indication that there is not always a straight line between stock ownership and votes on the budget. But that is decidedly not the case with many other members who cash in on defense stocks while wielding power in favor of bigger defense spending.

    Members of the Foreign Affairs, Homeland Security, Intelligence, and Appropriations committees also reported trades that could constitute a conflict of interest.

    John Rutherford (R-Fla.), for instance, traded Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, and BAE Systems stock while sitting on the House Appropriations subcommittee responsible for determining the Department of Homeland Security’s funding. All three of those companies have been awarded contracts with the Department of Homeland Security. Rutherford then bought Raytheon stock the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, a company that has also been awarded contracts by the Department of Homeland Security.

    The New York Times analysis defines a potential conflict of interest fairly narrowly, only focusing on stock trades in companies relevant to committee assignments. Given the daunting task of assembling such a comprehensive list, it is also limited to that three-year span. As a result, it doesn’t include instances like Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) picking up Raytheon stock the day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) buying Lockheed Martin stock the day before. By the Times’ own admission, “the analysis is surely an undercount.”

    Though all of these lawmakers deny any impropriety, the capacity for competing interests is clear; Congress continues to approve defense budgets beyond what even the Pentagon even asks for, more than half of which goes to private contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, which could in turn privately benefit members of Congress invested in those stocks.

    This could create a perverse incentive structure when taking into account that when global tensions rise, defense stocks tend to follow suit. War is often good for defense companies’ bottom line; Jon Schwartz noted in the Intercept last year that “defense stocks outperformed the stock market overall by 58 percent during the Afghanistan War.” Some members of the defense industry even acknowledge this connection, as Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes did during an earnings call earlier this year:

    “We are seeing, I would say, opportunities for international sales. We just have to look to last week where we saw the drone attack in the UAE, which have attacked some of their other facilities. And of course, the tensions in Eastern Europe, the tensions in the South China Sea, all of those things are putting pressure on some of the defense spending over there. So I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it.”

    Pressure is mounting for Congress to seriously consider self-regulation of stock trading. Seventy percent of Americans support banning lawmakers from trading stocks, including a majority of both Democratic and Republican voters. To date, at least six different bills have been proposed to limit the ability of members of Congress to trade stock.

    Despite the popularity of these measures, self-regulation is always a tall order. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) went on record saying that limiting lawmakers’ ability to trade stocks would be “ridiculous” and that “it would really cut back on the amount of people that would want to come up here and serve.” Tuberville himself traded stock of major defense contractors such as Honeywell and General Dynamics while sitting on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

    Confidence in Congress sits in the single digits, as overinvestment in the Pentagon has come at the underinvestment in healthcare, education, and addressing the climate crisis. Even if lawmakers defend their trades as routine, the goal should be to eliminate both the appearance and reality of conflict in setting national security priorities.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Black Voters Are Fighting Racial Gerrymandering in Louisiana

    From record inflation to attacks on reproductive rights, to an unfair and inequitable redistricting, it can feel like all hope has been lost this year. But many voters are not giving up.

    My state of Louisiana has faced multiple challenges, particularly when it comes to the electoral process. Historically, we have seen literacy tests, brutal attacks on persons seeking to register to vote, the elimination of voting sites, changing polling sites without notification, and other efforts to deny and abridge the right to vote. We have experienced voter suppression in all its forms, including its newest more insidious form, racial and partisan gerrymandering.

    In 2022, the Louisiana state legislature drew unfair congressional district lines. Voters, including those reached through my organization, the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, testified throughout this year’s redistricting process, which saw unprecedented, historic citizen participation. This fight then pivoted to asking Gov. John Bel Edwards to veto the maps. He did so, and then the legislature overrode his veto. we took our case to court in the Middle District and initially won. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s ruling and temporarily halted the drawing of a second minority-majority district until the high court rules in Alabama’s redistricting case in October. (A minority-majority district is one in which the majority of the constituents are racial or ethnic majorities.) Presently, we have one minority-majority district although Black population growth warrants a second minority-majority district. As our legal counsel has noted, the current congressional district “severely dilutes Black voting power by packing Black voters from New Orleans and Baton Rouge into a single U.S. congressional district.” We have been temporarily delayed in the fight for fair maps — but not permanently denied.

    There have been multiple efforts to silence the voices of the growing majority minority. At every turn, and before every election, a new tactic has been introduced to abridge some voters’ ability to participate in our nation’s democracy. Democracy Docket summarized research detailing over 100 years of voter suppression in Louisiana — from restricting who could register, closing polling sites, limiting when people could vote, permitting felony disenfranchisement, the efforts to curtail access to the ballot in Louisiana have been ongoing. These barriers, obstructive as they are, do not alter our drive, our passion, and our hunger for pro-democracy action.

    We have been deferred but we will not be deterred. In fact, more than 250 Black Louisiana voters to showed up at our state capitol during the opening of the redistricting special session on February 1 and 2 and to make their voices heard during the redistricting session. They filled the state capitol and showed that our community is concerned and engaged. Many voters came even though a second minority-majority district would not impact their part of the state.

    All Black people are impacted by the lack of a second congressional district. A second person voting in their interest on key issues is critical. Moreover, a second congressional district would give Baton Rouge and the Delta parishes an opportunity to have a voice. This is important for a host of reasons, including the fact that Poverty Point (in the Delta) is the poorest place in the country and it is 80 percent Black. They have experienced a failure to thrive because they’ve not been a priority. It seems that this region is an afterthought given the current configuration of the districts. That is why all Black people understand that having multiple African American leaders in Congress would strengthen democracy and make it more likely that legislation important to Black voters, such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill, could advance.

    While we have faced setbacks in our efforts to secure a second minority-majority seat, we are not without hope. We have not resigned in defeat. Defeat only occurs when we refuse to believe that victory is possible. Defeat comes when we refuse to fight, and in communities across the country, many people are fighting for a future for which our children can be proud. We believe better is possible and attainable.

    This year has been tough, but we cannot lose sight of the progress we’ve made and the possibilities for our future. For instance, since 2015, my organization has focused on building infrastructure, celebrating many wins in the process, including:

    • Ensuring naturalized citizens could vote like every other voter in Louisiana;
    • Reenfranchising formerly incarcerated people with our founding and anchor partner VOTE, as well as a ballot measure ending the racist practice of convicting people with non-unanimous juries;
    • Expanding Medicaid, which provides more than 350,000 Louisianians with health care;
    • Expanding voting rights for the last two years as the rest of the country was going the other way.

    But there are other wins which may not seem “sexy” but are incredibly important. We built trust through our advocacy work, created space for deep listening and the centering of directly impacted people and built momentum that will support our advocacy work in the future.

    It is impossible to overstate that progress doesn’t happen overnight; it is a gradual process. We are working right now to prepare Black voters in the 5th District to elect their candidate of choice because this fight isn’t just about this year, but about the next 10 years. As we head into the 2022 midterm elections, we do not have to hang our heads. Freedom is a long game. It is also a perpetual struggle. We will never get to the point where we can shift into cruise control. That is not what our ancestors fought for — this moment requires no less than to hold the line on what they fought for and to continue to position future generations for success.

  • GOP’s 15-Week Abortion Ban Is a Midterm Tactic — But Not in the Way You Think

    On Tuesday, less than three months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina) introduced a national 15-week abortion ban in the U.S. Senate. The bill, the first Republican abortion ban proposed since Roe’s end, contains exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of the pregnant person. The measure is sure to fail in the Democratically controlled Senate, where it would need to get 60 votes to override a filibuster, and it’s out of step with the majority of Americans, who support safe, legal abortion care — a number that has only grown in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June.

    The bill’s timing seems odd. While Republican candidates are scrubbing their websites of any mention of opposition to abortion and a national surge of newly registered women voters may upend the midterm elections, why is a leading Republican senator proposing a national 15-week abortion ban?

    The timing and the legislation aren’t mistakes or accidents. Instead, they reflect the long game that Republicans and abortion opponents have been playing on abortion for decades, one that helped them overturn Roe v. Wade and make abortion illegal in a dozen states –– moving the goal posts to the right. A decade ago, a leading Senate Republican proposing a 15-week abortion ban would have been unthinkable: Roe v. Wade was the established law of the land, and the Supreme Court had already previously upheld it. Instead of outright banning abortion, Republicans were devising ways to make it inaccessible, like Targeted Regulation of Abortion Provider (TRAP) laws, trying to work around Roe rather than explicitly violating it. Now, it’s not only par for the course; this proposed ban is being used as a media tool to position the party that ripped our constitutional right to abortion from underneath us as somehow more middle-of-the-road.

    To understand how this strategically deployed messaging tool is functioning, take a look at the responses of some other leading Republicans. Commenting on the ban proposal, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told CNN that he’d like to “have each state handle those issues.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) echoed him, saying, “I think most of the members of my conference prefer that this be dealt with at the state level.”

    As they have since Roe was overturned in June, unleashing a wave of outrage among broad swaths of the electorate, many Republicans once again chose to frame abortion as a “states’ rights” issue — one that they, at the federal level, aren’t interested in pursuing.

    But their records reveal that they are lying, just like they were lying when Republican-nominated justices said that Roe v. Wade was settled law. Both Cornyn and McConnell have voted for 20-week abortion bans in the past, and there is no reason to believe that they wouldn’t support other national bans even though they claim to reject this one.

    When Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was decided in June, Senator Cornyn issued a statement, praising the ruling as a “historic victory for life.” Prior to Roe’s demise, McConnell said that if the landmark ruling was indeed overturned, a national abortion ban was, in fact, “possible.” In response to Graham’s proposed 15-week ban, former Vice President Mike Pence once again reiterated that the next Republican president would support a national abortion ban, potentially allowing it to go into effect.

    Senator Graham, who won reelection in 2020 and won’t face South Carolina voters again until 2026, has nothing to lose from proposing a national 15-week ban now. With the Senate, House and presidency all controlled by the Democrats, the bill won’t pass. He knows this. Other Republicans know this. Everybody knows this. Proposing the 15-week ban now allows Senator Graham to position himself as a “pro-life” leader while allowing many of his Republican colleagues to feign distance from an abortion ban and position themselves as more moderate on the issue, just weeks before the midterm elections.

    This proposed ban has given national Republicans precisely the kind of headlines they only could have dreamed of a few weeks ago. “Republicans Struggle to Unite Party Around National Abortion Restrictions,” reads the New York Times. “Graham’s abortion ban stuns Senate GOP,” says Politico. At ABC News, the headline is even more explicit: “Graham’s proposed near-total abortion ban quickly meets GOP resistance.”

    The narrative spin is working –– mainstream media coverage is suddenly allowing many Republicans to masquerade as far more moderate on the issue of abortion than their voting records or previous statements would indicate. Senate Republicans have repeatedly blocked any attempt to protect abortion rights at the federal level. Senate Republicans have embraced and voted for numerous restrictions, including a 20-week abortion ban just two years ago.

    Now, instead of talking about how Republicans have created a post-Roe hellscape in which 10-year-old rape victims are forced to travel out of state for abortion care, or a pregnant woman was forced to carry a dead fetus inside of her for two weeks after she miscarried, the media narrative is focused on how Senate Republicans refuse to support Graham’s 15-week abortion ban.

    Abortion is once again reduced to a political football, and Republicans now have a narrative opening to slither out of the hole they dug for themselves by using this doomed-from-the-start abortion ban as a straw man for their moderating posture. For decades, Republicans put in the tedious work of shifting the legislative goal posts around abortion further and further to the right, all while publicly posturing about moderation and settled law, chiding abortion rights supporters as “hysterical” for asserting that Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court was a death knell for Roe v. Wade. Now, they’re doing it again with their response to this 15-week abortion ban.

    Make no mistake –– there has been no change of heart for this party. The proposed abortion ban and the resulting Republican arm-flailing aren’t the result of a moderated approach to abortion rights. This is a cynical ploy to lure the American public into helping Republicans shift the narrative away from their extremism. It’s well past time to stop letting them get away with it.

  • Auto industry greed stands between us and a climate-safe future

    The post Auto industry greed stands between us and a climate-safe future appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • Why do some of Canada’s premiers never tire of flogging the carbon price horse?

    The post Why do some of Canada’s premiers never tire of flogging the carbon price horse? appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • How Can We Build Democracy in the South — in Electoral Politics and Beyond?

    The myth of U.S. democracy is on the verge of shattering.

    In the region where cotton was king and prisons have succeeded the throne, this myth’s falseness is particularly evident in the U.S. South, the epicenter of the nation’s plantation and chattel slavery economy where the majority of Black/African-descended people still exist today. This region is also the land where Jim Crow law/segregation law once ruled and whose specter determines how resources are still allocated today. It’s also the region in which workers are least unionized and often hyper-exploited, with community members disproportionately subject to state violence such as incarceration or deportation.

    Given these deathly conditions, the seats of power in our region are filled by those who benefit from these systems and uphold them, oppressing Southerners both historically and presently. In response, Southern freedom fighters have been fighting to build a grassroots democracy that is directly informed by the needs of our region, beginning at the local level. In so many ways, the efforts of Southern freedom fighters are an extension of freedom fighters in the Global South who share experiences of exploitation in the workplace, state violence and increased rates of incarceration, and have led organizing fights that inform strategies in the U.S. South. Formations like the Southern Movement Assembly are uniting U.S. Southern grassroots organizations with comrades across the Global South, particularly Central and South America, to develop a people’s democracy across colonial borders.

    The Highlander Research and Education Center, where I work, is a Southern movement school, building democratic participation in the U.S. South and Appalachia through grassroots organizing, leadership development, and movement building. Highlander, which was established 90 years ago, has helped fuel the Southern fight for liberation against white supremacist capitalism.

    Highlander supported the integration of labor unions in the 1930s and 40s, was a meeting place for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1950s and held trainings for civil rights activists during the sit-ins of the 1960s, and Highlander’s Education Director Septima Clark initiated the Citizenship Schools that expanded access to voting rights for Black people.

    Although Highlander may be best known as the place where Rosa Parks trained before the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and where Martin Luther King, Jr. attended workshops that contributed to being red-baited as part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, we know that many of the same issues these freedom fighters battled continue to face our communities today.

    My work as Highlander’s electoral justice researcher and educator seeks to build capacity for today’s Southern freedom fighters and their communities to govern themselves as we move toward building a truly democratic world beyond capitalism and white supremacy.

    This work goes beyond maximizing participation in the U.S. electoral system. This work seeks to build Southern communities’ capacity to collectively define their problems, learn and understand current power structures as they exist, and develop collective solutions based on the experiences and abilities of each community member.

    There is strategic value in engaging elections, but strategies for grassroots democracy must extend far beyond Election Day. While we understand that participating in this U.S. electoral system is presently inevitable, we also understand it is equally, if not more, vital to build parallel systems that are truly democratic and accountable to every community member.

    This work is reflected when we see People’s Movement Assemblies being utilized to build political power in cities such as Nashville, Tennessee; Jackson, Mississippi; Lexington, Kentucky; and so many more Southern cities.

    People’s Movement Assemblies are grassroots, democratic gatherings inspired by the World Social Forum in 2003, where collective decision-making spaces facilitated action plans that sparked international protests, leading to the Global Day of Action that year with millions of people worldwide taking to the streets to speak out against the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. These assemblies are used by communities to collectively assess their problems, determine their strategies, assess who has the power to materially change their conditions, and create grassroots solutions to bring their vision for a life-affirming world into reality. The Southern Movement Assembly, a regional formation that has been seeking to build grassroots democratic power across the South for 10 years with Southern freedom fighters and their communities, is inviting Southern community organizations to utilize People’s Movement Assemblies in their work throughout Summer 2022 to build collective power, community governance and action plans for organizing throughout the Global South.

    In the midst of the 2022 U.S. midterm elections for gubernatorial and legislative seats, Highlander has developed the People Practicing Power workshop intervention. During this workshop series, organizers and their community members are learning methods for self-protection during Election Day from racialized, fascist terrorism; the process for developing a policy demand into a law; and creating or joining efforts to build democratic institutions rooted in solidarity economy principles.

    “Solidarity economy” is an umbrella term for institutions and practices that are grounded in mutualism, cooperation, democracy, pluralism and building a world beyond racial capitalism.

    Examples of this include worker-owned cooperatives, time banks, participatory budgeting and community land trusts that place decision-making power and ownership directly in the hands of workers and communities that have been historically stripped of agency under white supremacist capitalism.

    The U.S. South is often seen by those outside the region as a right-wing stronghold and a recipient of charity. Our practice of rooting our work in the creation of solidarity economies acknowledges Southerners’ long history of not only surviving under white supremacist capitalism, but leading the charge to develop people-centered democracies and economies within the U.S.

    We invite anyone who is interested to plug into the workshops Highlander offers around solidarity economies, join us at our annual Homecoming event September 30-October 2, 2022, where we will celebrate 90 years of Southern movement building, and follow Highlander online for updates on upcoming workshops and learning spaces where Southern freedom fighters will build strong relationships and learn with each other to build a true democracy rooted in community governance throughout the U.S. South.

    The U.S. empire is crumbling due to the destruction created by capitalism. As this empire takes its last breaths, it doubles down on its centuries-old fascist violence domestically and abroad. From the ashes of this empire’s burning, people are using tools of community governance and solidarity economies to build a world beyond colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism. There is a new world coming, we’re building it together, and the time is here to usher it in.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden’s Actions Are a Start, But the US Is Still Sacrificing Poor People

    In the American ethos, sacrifice is often hailed as the chief ingredient for overcoming hardship and seizing opportunity. To be successful, we’re assured, college students must make personal sacrifices by going deep into debt for a future degree and the earnings that may come with it. Small business owners must sacrifice their paychecks so that their companies will continue to grow, while politicians must similarly sacrifice key policy promises to get something (almost anything!) done.

    We have become all too used to the notion that success only comes with sacrifice, even if this is anything but the truth for the wealthiest and most powerful Americans. After all, whether you focus on the gains of Wall Street or of this country’s best-known billionaires, the ever-rising Pentagon budget, or the endless subsidies to fossil-fuel companies, sacrifice is not exactly a theme for those atop this society. As it happens, sacrifice in the name of progress is too often relegated to the lives of the poor and those with little or no power. But what if, instead of believing that most of us must eternally “rob Peter to pay Paul,” we imagine a world in which everyone was in and no one out?

    In that context, consider recent policy debates on Capitol Hill as the crucial midterm elections approach. To start with, the passage of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) promises real, historic advances when it comes to climate change, health care, and fair tax policy. It’s comprehensive in nature and far-reaching not just for climate resilience but for environmental justice, too. Still, the legislation is distinctly less than what climate experts tell us we need to keep this planet truly livable.

    In addition, President Biden’s cancellation of up to $20,000 per person in student loans could wipe out the debt of nearly half of all borrowers. This unprecedented debt relief demonstrates that a policy agenda lifting from the bottom is both compassionate and will stimulate the broader economy. Still, it, too, doesn’t go far enough when it comes to those suffocating under a burden of debt that has long served as a dead weight on the aspirations of millions.

    In fact, a dual response to those developments and others over the past months seems in order. As a start, a striking departure from the neoliberal dead zone in which our politics have been trapped for decades should certainly be celebrated. Rather than sit back with a sense of satisfaction, however, those advances should only be built upon.

    Let’s begin by looking under the hood of the IRA. After all, that bill is being heralded as the most significant climate legislation in our history and its champions claim that, by 2030, it will have helped reduce this country’s carbon emissions by roughly 40% from their 2005 levels. Since a reduction of any kind seemed out of reach not so long ago, it represents a significant step forward.

    Among other things, it ensures investments of more than $60 billion in clean energy manufacturing; an estimated $30 billion in production tax credits geared toward increasing the manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines, and more; about $30 billion for grant and loan programs to speed up the transition to clean electricity; and $27 billion for a greenhouse gas reduction fund that will allow states to provide financial assistance to low-income communities so that they, too, can benefit from rooftop solar installations and other clean energy developments.

    The IRA also seeks to lower energy costs and reduce utility bills for individual Americans through tax credits that will encourage purchases of energy-efficient homes, vehicles, and appliances. Among other non-climate-change advances, it caps out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs, reduces health insurance premiums for 13 million Americans, and provides free vaccinations for seniors.

    As the nation’s biggest investment in the climate so far, it demonstrates the willingness of the Biden administration to address the climate crisis. It also highlights just how stalled this country has been on that issue for so long and how much more work there is to do. Of course, given our ever hotter planet and the role this country has played in it as the historically greatest greenhouse gas emitter of all time, anything less than legislation that will lead to net-zero carbon emissions is a far cry from what’s necessary, as this country burns, floods, and overheats in a striking fashion.

    Pipelines and Sacrifice Zones

    Earlier iterations of what became the IRA recognized a historic opportunity to enact policies connecting the defense of the planet to the defense of human life and needs. Because of the resistance of Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, as well as every Senate Republican, the final version of the reconciliation bill includes worrying sacrifices. It does not, for instance, have an extension or expansion of the Child Tax Credit, a lifeline for poor and low-income families, nor does it raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, even though that was a promise made in the 2020 election. Gone as well are plans for free pre-kindergarten and community college, in addition to the nation’s first paid family-leave program that would have provided up to $4,000 a month to cover births, deaths, and other pivotal moments in everyday life.

    And don’t forget to add to what’s missing any real pain for fossil-fuel companies. After all, coal baron Manchin seems to have succeeded in cutting a side deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for a massive natural gas pipeline through his home state of West Virginia and that’s just to begin a list of concessions. Indeed, the sacrificial negotiations with Manchin to get the bill passed ensured significantly more domestic fossil-fuel production, including agreement that the Interior Department would auction off permits to drill for yet more oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska, and possibly elsewhere, all of which will offset some of the emissions reductions from climate-change-related provisions in the bill.

    It’s important to note as well that, although progress was made on reducing fossil-fuel emissions, expanding health care, and creating a fairer tax system, for the poor in this country, “sacrifice zones” are hardly a thing of the past. As journalist Andrew Kaufman suggests, “One thing that does seem assured, however, is that the arrival — at last — of a federal climate law has not heralded an end to the suffering [of] communities living near heavy fossil-fuel polluters.” And as Rafael Mojica, program director for the Michigan environmental justice group Soulardarity, put it, the IRA “is riddled with concessions to the big carbon-based industries that at present prey on our communities at the expense of their health, both physically and economically.”

    Keep in mind that Michigan is already anything but a stranger to sacrifice zones. Case in point: the water crisis in the city of Flint as well as in Detroit. The Flint Democracy Defense League and the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization have battled lead-poisoning and water shut-offs for years in the face of deindustrialization and the lack of a right to clean water in this country. Such grassroots efforts helped sound the alarm during the Flint water crisis that began in 2014 and have since linked community groups nationwide dealing with high levels of toxins in their water supply so that they could learn from that city’s grassroots organizing experience. Meanwhile, so many years later, Michiganders are still protesting potential polluters like Enbridge’s aging Line 5 oil pipeline.

    And there are many other examples of frontline community groups protesting the ways in which their homes are being sacrificed on the altar of the fossil-fuel industry. Take, for example, the communities in the stretch of Louisiana between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that contain hundreds of petrochemical facilities and has, eerily enough, come to be known as Cancer Alley. There, among a mostly poor and Black population, you can find some of the highest cancer rates in the country. In St. James Parish alone, there are 12 petrochemical plants and nearly every household has felt the impact of cancer. For years, Rise St. James and other local groups have been working to prevent the construction of a new plastics facility near local schools on land that once was a slave burial ground.

    Then, of course, there are many other sacrifice zones where the issue isn’t fossil fuels. Take the city of Aberdeen in Grays Harbor County, Washington, once home to a thriving timber and lumber economy. After its natural landscape was stripped and the local economy declined, that largely white, rural community fell into endemic poverty, homelessness, and drug abuse. Chaplains on the Harbor, one of the few community organizations with a presence in homeless encampments across the county, has now started a sustainable farm run by formerly homeless and incarcerated young people in Aberdeen as part of an attempt to create models for the building of green communities in places rejected by so many.

    Or take Oak Flat, Arizona, the holiest site for the San Carlos Apache tribe. There, a group called the Apache Stronghold is leading a struggle to protect that tribe’s sacred lands against harm from Resolution Copper, a multinational mining company permitted to extract minerals on those lands thanks to a midnight rider put into the National Defense Authorization Act in 2015. Along with a growing number of First Nations people and their supporters, it has been fighting to protect that land from becoming another sacrifice zone on the altar of corporate greed.

    On the east coast, consider Union Hill, Virginia, where residents of a historic Black community fought for years to block the construction of three massive compressor stations for fracked gas flowing from the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Those facilities would have potentially subjected residents to staggering amounts of air pollution, but early in 2020 community organizers won the fight to stop construction.

    Consider as well the work of Put People First PA!, which, in Pennsylvania communities like Grant Township and Erie, is on the tip of the spear in the fight against an invasive and devastating fracking industry that’s ripping up land and exposing Pennsylvanians to the sort of pollutants that leaders in Union Hill fought to prevent. Note as well that, in many similar places, hospitals are being privatized or shuttered, leaving residents without significant access to health care, even as the risk of respiratory illnesses and other industrially caused diseases grows.

    Such disparate communities reflect a long-term history of suffering — from the violence inflicted on indigenous people, to the slave plantations of the South, to the expansion (and then steep decline) of industrial production in the North and West, to pipelines still snaking across the countryside. And now historic pain inflicted on low-income and poor Americans will increase thanks to a growing climate crisis, as the people of flooded and drinking-water-barren Jackson, Mississippi, discovered recently.

    In a world of megadroughts, superstorms, wildfires, and horrific flooding guaranteed to wreak ever more havoc on lives and livelihoods, poor and low-income people are beginning to demand action commensurate with the crisis at hand.

    Dark Clouds Blowing in From the “Equality State”

    While reports on the passage of the IRA and student debt relief dominated the news cycle, another major policy announcement at the close of the summer and far from Capitol Hill slipped far more quietly into the news. It highlights yet again the “sacrifices” that poor Americans are implicitly expected to make to strengthen the economy. Just outside of Jackson, Wyoming, one of the wealthiest and most unequal towns in this country, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell committed his organization to take “forceful and rapid steps to moderate demand so that it comes into better alignment with supply and to keep inflation expectations anchored.”

    Couched in typically wonkish language, his comments — made in the “equality state” — may sound benign, but he was suggesting capping wages, an act whose effects will, in the end, fall most heavily on poor and low-income people. Indeed, he warned, mildly enough, that this would mean “some pain for households and businesses” — even as he was ensuring that the livelihoods of poor and low-income people would once again be sacrificed for what passes as the greater good.

    What does it mean, for instance, to “moderate demand” for food when more than 12 million families with children are already hungry each month? It should strike us as wrong to call for “some pain” for so many households facing crises like possible evictions or foreclosures, crushing debt, and a lack of access to decent health care. It should be considered inhumane to advocate for a “softer labor market” when one in three workers is already earning less than $15 an hour.

    It is disingenuous to say that the economy is “overheating,” as if what’s being experienced is some strange, abstract anomaly rather than the result of decades of disinvestment in infrastructure and social programs that could have provided the basic necessities of life for everyone. Nonetheless, Powell continues to push a false narrative of scarcity and the threat of inflation to smother the powerful resurgence of courageous and creative labor organizing that we’ve seen, miraculously enough, in these pandemic years.

    At this point, as a pastor and theologian, I can’t resist quoting Jesus’s choice words in the Gospel of Matthew about how poor people so often pay the price for the further enrichment of the already wealthy. In Matthew 9, Jesus asserts: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” The Greek word “mercy” is defined as loving kindness, taking care of the down and out. In Jesus’s parlance, mercy meant acts of mutual solidarity and societal policies that prioritized the needs of the poor, which would today translate into cancelling debts, raising wages, and investing in social programs.

    Despite the encouraging policy-making that hit the headlines this summer, America remains a significant sacrifice zone with economic policies that justify their painful impact on the poor and marginalized as necessary for the greater good. It’s time for us to fight for a comprehensive, intersectional, bottom-up approach to the injustices that continually unfold around us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Here’s How We Stop the Republicans’ National Abortion Ban

    On Tuesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) led a group of GOP senators in introducing legislation to enact a nationwide ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, highlighting a new focus for anti-abortion legislators.

    Republicans, including Senator Graham, have often argued that abortion is an issue best handled at the state level. However, abortion advocates have long anticipated that Republicans would attempt to pass a national abortion ban once Roe v. Wade was struck down by the Supreme Court. Within hours of the court handing down its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, Republican legislators began publicly discussing their interest in supporting a national abortion ban.

    The law proposed this week by Senator Graham would criminalize the provision of abortion after 15 weeks with very narrow exceptions for rape, incest involving a minor, or substantial threat to the pregnant person’s physical health. There would be no exceptions for severe fetal abnormalities, including those incompatible with life. Health care providers who perform abortions after 15 weeks would face prison time of up to five years, fines, or both.

    People who terminate their pregnancies — and the parents of minors who terminate their pregnancies — would also be able to pursue civil suits against their abortion providers under the proposed legislation. Anti-abortion politicians use this strategy both to feign concern for abortion patients, whom they falsely argue often experience regret, and to target abortion providers with heightened legal risk. Such laws often leave abortion providers with no option but to purchase extra costly liability insurance that other health care specialties do not require.

    At Tuesday’s press conference, flanked by representatives of anti-abortion groups including March for Life and the National Right to Life Committee, Senator Graham justified his 15-week abortion ban with unscientific claims, spreading the lie that fetuses can sense physical pain beginning at 15 weeks. According to the American College of Obstericians and Gynecologists, scientific evidence has “conclusively established” that a human fetus cannot experience pain “until after at least 24-25 weeks.”

    The proposed bill uses the non-medical term “late-term abortion” to describe abortions performed after 15 weeks — a usage that notably diverges from the conventional use of the phrase by anti-abortion politicians and groups to describe the medical termination of a pregnancy between 21 and 24 weeks.

    Evidence suggests that Senator Graham’s bill would negatively impact the physical, mental and socioeconomic well-being of abortion seekers. The findings of the Turnaway Study, a landmark research study conducted by researchers at UCSF, found that those who were denied an abortion due to a gestational limit had significantly worse socioeconomic and physical and mental health outcomes compared to those who received abortion care.

    At his press conference, Senator Graham claimed a 15-week ban would bring U.S. abortion policy “in line with other developed nations,” a misleading claim that obfuscates the fact that in most of the countries he named as examples, exceptions for those seeking abortion care after the legal limit are generally permitted on the broad grounds of protecting the physical or mental health or the socioeconomic well-being of the pregnant person.

    Due to the current Democratic majority, the Senate will not vote on Graham’s bill ahead of November’s midterm elections. However, if Republicans gain control of Congress, a vote on a nationwide abortion ban is possible (though it would likely be vetoed by Biden). Such legislation would be devastating for abortion seekers, health care providers and their communities, especially communities of color and poor people.

    It was not long ago that most Democratic politicians were complacently dismissive of warnings that Roe v. Wade was under threat, and even though it is not politically feasible in this current moment, it is key to understand that anti-abortion groups and politicians will continue working toward the implementation of a nationwide abortion ban. In a demonstration of the anti-abortion right’s tendency to employ deliberate long-term strategies in order to realize their objectives, Senator Graham suggested at his press conference Tuesday, “if we stay on this and keep talking about it maybe in a decade this will be law.”

    Reproductive Care Is Already in Crisis

    Abortion care in the United States is already in a state of emergency. Providers in restricted states are scrambling to provide care in a constantly changing legislative environment. Abortion funds have closed or paused services due to legal concerns. Prominent reproductive health care organizations have abandoned patients, providers and funds in restricted states, and abortion advocates are increasingly frustrated by the Biden administration’s lack of action.

    Meanwhile, reproductive health care clinics in less restricted states are struggling to manage the increased demand due to abortion patients traveling from out of state and are consequently seeing significantly increased wait-times for abortion appointments. Nationwide, financial and practical barriers to accessing abortion care, including lack of insurance coverage, the necessity of arranging for time off work and childcare, and the ubiquity and aggressive tactics of fake abortion clinics already delay patients’ access to abortion care.

    A national abortion ban would further increase the risk of criminalization of pregnant people based on their medical conditions or actions taken during their pregnancy. A recent report by the reproductive legal advocacy group If/When/How found that people have been investigated for pregnancy loss in 26 states, even though only a handful of states specifically prohibit self-managed abortion.

    Pregnant people who are already at a higher risk of criminalization — in particular poor people, immigrants, Black people and other people of color — have been jailed for substance use during pregnancy, for self-managing abortions, or for unintentional miscarriages. As more people are forced to obtain extralegal abortions, the most vulnerable pregnant people face criminalization and imprisonment. Recent arrests in Alabama of Ashley Banks and in Texas of Lizelle Herrera show the devastating impacts of this increased policing of pregnant bodies.

    Senator Graham’s proposed bill effectively puts abortion on the ballot at the upcoming midterm elections, but voting alone is far from sufficient to defend abortion access. The majority of Americans are opposed to abortion bans, and it is crucial that we harness the present political momentum around this issue to build a mass movement to protect and expand abortion access nationwide.

    We can’t wait for Democratic lawmakers to address this state of emergency. We must organize our communities and workplaces to demand reproductive justice and advocate on behalf of patients and providers, especially those in hostile and legally precarious environments. We will not and cannot accept any abortion restrictions or bans, all of which coerce and force people into continuing their pregnancies.

    Taking action to defend abortion access is a community responsibility. As individuals we can set up a recurring donation to an abortion fund, volunteer as a clinic escort and share information about safe methods of self-managed abortion to alleviate the burden of the overloaded reproductive health care system across the country.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Law-and-Order Policies Make Us Less Safe. The Trajectory of the ’90s Shows Why.

    Across the United States, Democratic politicians are renewing their commitments to 1990s-era crime policies. From New York City Mayor Eric Adams instructing the NYPD to increase misdemeanor arrests, to the Detroit police cracking down on noise and “urban blight,” to Los Angeles’s City Council intensifying the criminalization of homeless people, the hallmarks of broken windows policing are heralded as solutions to the supposedly unprecedented national crime surge. At the national level, President Biden’s “Safer America Plan” promises to increase federal funding for local law enforcement and put 100,000 more cops on the streets in community policing programs — a direct repeat of President Bill Clinton’s notorious C.O.P.S program, which distributed millions of federal funds to law enforcement, escalating policing and arrests nationwide.

    While proponents pretend that such practices do not constitute broken windows policing tactics but “quality of life” or “community policing,” in fact, there has never been a division between these policing practices, logics or outcomes. While technocratic criminal justice practitioners advocate for these policies as simply following “evidence-based practices,” this is simply not the case. We are witnessing a liberal law-and-order backlash to anti-racist activism against policing. Through scapegoating abolitionist movements to defund the police and more moderate criminal justice reforms as the source of violent crime, Democrats are returning to the very playbooks that propelled mass incarceration.

    One place we can clearly see this dynamic occurring is in New Orleans. After years of grassroots success in pushing city leaders to enact criminal justice reforms, the mayor and city council of New Orleans have implemented a series of tough-on-crime policies throughout 2022. Predicated on the false assertion that the current murder rate in New Orleans has reached heights not witnessed since the 1990s, Mayor LaToya Cantrell has championed the relaunch of a gang unit, the repeal of the city’s ban on facial recognition surveillance and the attempt to end the federal consent decree over the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD). Such moves coincide with incarcerated people protesting inhumane conditions at the jail under New Orleans’s new “progressive” sheriff, and District Attorney Jason Williams going back on his campaign promise not to try juveniles as adults.

    Continuing this pattern, Mayor Cantrell announced in August of 2022 that the city is hiring a team of New York City policing consultants — including John Linder, who served as a consultant for the NOPD in the 1990s. While Linder has long been credited by city leaders and mainstream media in helping root out police corruption and reduce crime, the actual history of the NOPD’s 1990s initiatives tells a different story. Instead of stemming a crime wave, Linder’s recommendations aided in producing New Orleans as an epicenter of mass criminalization.

    The previous hiring of John Linder — then part of the Linder Maple Group — occurred during a period of high-profile reforms to the NOPD. In 1994 then-Mayor Marc Morial appointed Richard Pennington as the superintendent of the NOPD to modernize law enforcement and restore public confidence in policing to better fight on crime. At the time, concerns about rising crime were sensationalized by local news that positioned New Orleans as exceptionally violent.

    Pennington enacted a series of reforms he termed the “Pennington Plan”: the creation of a Public Integrity Bureau aimed at weeding out corrupt cops; the implementation of community policing — the increased saturation of police in Black working class and poor communities; the expansion of police training on topics from interrogation techniques to customer service; and the appropriation of pay raises to all police officers.

    While the named purpose of the Pennington Plan was to restore public safety in response to out-of-control crime, these reforms went hand-in-hand with Morial’s urban redevelopment aims; policing public space was deemed essential for gentrification projects. As documented in the “City of New Orleans 1995 Annual Report,” Morial sought to expand the city’s tourism economy through building a new convention center and expanding the footprint of the downtown tourism areas. In addition, Morial advocated for the privatization of public housing in the name of “revitalizing” neighborhoods through the displacement of long-term Black working-class and poor residents.

    In 1996, Morial hired the Linder Maple Group to develop a five-year plan for the NOPD. The Linder Maple Group, well known as architects of the NYPD’s adoption of broken windows policing, was a strategic choice as Morial sought to remake New Orleans along the lines of Giuliani’s New York. While the NOPD had integrated aspects of broken windows policing in the first phase of the Pennington Plan, the Linder Maple Group proposed more. Following the recommendations of Linder Maple, the NOPD increased patrols in the French Quarter and the adjacent Downtown Development District along with the adoption of zero tolerance for “quality of life” offenses to visibly mark that the city was clamping down on disorder.

    In addition, the NOPD adopted CompStat, which used statistics to track complaints and arrests by geographic policing districts to identify concentrated “hot spots” to hold district commanders to quantitative policing goals — incentivizing higher arrest rates. CompStat’s adoption was coupled with the NOPD de-prioritizing response to 911 calls. Finally, in a 1996 press conference Pennington announced his plan to implement a recruitment campaign to increase the NOPD from 1,285 to 1,700 cops.

    Following these initiatives, Morial and Pennington were widely heralded by writers in the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, and beyond for the professionalization of the NOPD and the city’s triumph over crime. Yet against the claims made by city boosters, these policing policies impacts on crime rates were more than uneven.

    Like elsewhere in the U.S., New Orleans was already experiencing a general crime decline prior to the election of Morial. While homicides did experience a notable decline after 1995 (before the hiring of Linder Maple), overall offenses labeled “violent crime” and those labeled “property crime” by the NOPD were on a significant downward trend as early as 1990, according to data provided by the City of New Orleans. Furthermore, there was little to no significant correlation between implementing broken windows and community policing tactics on the city’s drop in crime. Indeed, as political science scholar Kevin A. Unter has documented, it was more likely violence would go up rather than drop following the increase in officers and the implementation of CompStat. And against the liberal notion that professionalizing police could end the endemic racial violence of policing, New Orleanians continued to experience police corruption and abuse, as evidenced by dozens of letters to elected officials in the late 1990s and early 2000s that I reviewed while doing archival research.

    Under these policies, New Orleans’s arrest rates skyrocketed. Municipal arrests jumped from 20,000 to almost 35,000, traffic arrests jumped from 4,500 to 11,00, and drug arrests jumped from just under 4,000 to over 7,000 between 1994 and 1998, according to Unter’s doctoral research. Juvenile arrests climbed from just under 3,000 in 1993 to almost 10,000 in 1998. With this continual surge of people into the criminal legal system, 1998 marked the year that Louisiana became the state with the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the United States.

    Counter to the assumptions made by Democratic leaders swept up in the current wave of law-and-order nostalgia, the return of 1990s-era policing practices will not make our cities safer but it will heighten arrests and incarceration. Investing in state violence will not end interpersonal violence. It will sow disorder and instability for countless people.

  • The Supreme Court Won’t Save Us — It Was Founded to Defend White Supremacy

    Conventional wisdom tells us the Supreme Court’s dominion is the administration of justice. This misconception, however, prevents us from seeing it for what it truly is — a national defense agency.

    The Supreme Court’s path and, more significantly, the overall path of the U.S. are now being shaped by a conservative supermajority that is focused, resolute and unswerving in its commitment to systemically gut constitutional rights.

    The court’s recent rulings are part of the Republican Party’s attempt to restore absolute rule through a right-wing ideological takeover of the courts. Though the groundwork for such a takeover has been underway for decades at the state level, Donald Trump’s presidency undoubtedly helped accelerate plans when, after the GOP undemocratically facilitated the appointment of two new justices to the Supreme Court, Trump unfairly and illegitimately appointed a third. The stacking of the court with far-right justices is a strategic move meant to defend white Christian nationalism.

    The Constitution, which expressly calls for the Supreme Court’s existence, was drafted using blackness as the counterpoint to the framers’ core democratic values. In fact, the Constitution was written by slaveowners and was intended to be, in the words of historian David Waldstreicher, “deliberately ambiguous — but operationally proslavery.” Indeed, several of the Constitution’s clauses were written with the intent to strengthen the institution of slavery, such as the clause granting Congress the power to marshal “the Militia” to “execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” This clause made it possible to subdue, by any means necessary, the insurrections the framers and slaveholders feared the most, which were rebellions led by Black enslaved people. Furthermore, the constitutional guarantee to private property, made possible through the genocide of Indigenous tribes and theft of their lands, sought to promote the economic prosperity and spatial freedom of whites. The court protected the business of slavery for over three generations.

    The most influential pre-Civil War Supreme Court justices — Chief Justices John Marshall, Roger B. Taney and Associate Justice Joseph Story — viewed opposition to slavery as a threat to the national economy and security. Justice Marshall, the founder of American law and the longest-serving chief justice in U.S. history, was perhaps the most committed of the justices to maintain slavery.

    Paul Finkelman, a specialist in American legal history, explains in his new book, Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court, that Marshall “wrote almost every decision on slavery, shaping a jurisprudence that was hostile to free blacks and surprisingly lenient to people who violated the federal laws banning the African slave trade.” Importantly, Marshall’s slavery jurisprudence was influenced by his own involvement in the slave trade. Marshall often purchased, gifted or sold large numbers of Black enslaved people and, despite his numerous documented “transactions,” upon his death, as Finkelman tells us, “Marshall still owned more than 150 people. Had he not given away and sold so many, he would have owned 300 or more.”

    “Before the Civil War,” legal historian Michael J. Klarman explains, “the Court upheld federal fugitive slave laws against substantial constitutional changes, and it invalidated the laws of Northern states that were designed to protect free blacks from kidnapping from slave catchers.” After the Civil War, Klarman adds, the courts freed whites who enacted racial violence, invalidated laws granting black people equal access to public accommodations, and protected the constitutionality of state-mandated racial segregation laws. All of these measures guaranteed the economic and political disenfranchisement of Black people.

    Then, of course, there is the Dred Scott v. Sandford case, in which Chief Justice Taney ruled that no free or enslaved African American could be a citizen of the United States and, as such, did not have a right to sue in federal court. Taney opined: “[African Americans] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Writing in the Washington and Lee Law Review, Robert Burt argues that Taney recites the “most explicit racist dogma” and that “no decision has been more consistently reviled.” Indeed, and yet, this is the belief upon which this country was founded, and which the Supreme Court was entrusted to defend.

    Placing the Supreme Court in the context of this history reveals a pattern. Since its inception, the court has generally operated to enshrine whiteness as the normative baseline in constitutional law, and to strengthen this baseline by consistently favoring and reinforcing the superior status of whites in the U.S.

    Chair of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at UCLA School of Law Cheryl I. Harris writes, “Following the period of slavery and conquest, white identity became the basis of racialized privilege that was ratified and legitimated in law as a type of status property.” And so, whiteness and property share the same conceptual premise of a right to exclude. Whiteness, however, occupies a normative position of authority, legibility and power in society through its relation to, distance from, and subordination and exclusion of Blackness. The right to exclude implies the need to defend whiteness as property.

    To be sure, this image of the Supreme Court does not align with the one most Americans hold. The image of the court as a vanguard of liberty and justice, protecting those who are disadvantaged, oppressed or treated unjustly, stems from its own rebranding during the civil rights era. The court instrumentalized this era to recast itself as “colorblind,” strategically using race-neutral language to accommodate demands for civil, economic and racial justice while simultaneously using it as a shield to maintain racial domination. “White supremacy,” according to Nancy Heitzeg, professor of sociology at St. Catherine University, “once writ large in the law via slavery and Jim Crow segregation, was removed from its legalized pedestal with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and finally, The Fair Housing Act of 1968.” Though the law became race neutral, she cautions us, the court’s institutionalized racism “remains merely transformed with its systemic foundations intact.”

    What’s more, the conservative highjacking of the court by religious fundamentalists means constitutional law is being reshaped through the lens of Christian Dominionism (defined by Frederick Clarkson of Political Research Associates as the belief that Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions). White Christian dominionists believe that the U.S. is a fundamentally Christian nation and, therefore, that they have the authority to enact religious supremacy. This was stated by Justice Samuel Alito at a summit convened in July by Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative. During his speech, Alito made a call to arms on behalf of Christian dominionism, stating: “The challenge for those who want to protect religious liberty in the United States, Europe and other similar places is to convince people who are not religious that religious liberty is worth special protection.” Pope Francis, echoing Alito’s words, stated that religious liberty “remains one of America’s most precious possessions,” adding that “all are called to be vigilant … to preserve and defend that freedom from everything that would threaten or compromise it.”

    Religious liberty is not what is being criticized here but rather the euphemistic use of the phrase to mean white Christian dominionism. Perilously, the Republican Party’s desire to strengthen white supremacist ideology through religious fundamentalism is succeeding insofar as the court’s most recent rulings — Dobbs, NYSRPA and Vega — are restructuring constitutional doctrine to reflect the interests of white Christian nationalists.

    To be sure, Democratic leaders recently introduced a bill to establish term limits for Supreme Court justices, a measure Republicans have opposed. They have revived calls to reform the court by increasing the number of justices. This strategy is being presented as a necessary yet reasonable measure to ensure fair and unbiased judicial reviews. But this push to reform the Supreme Court risks distracting attention from the racist origins of the court and what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor describes as the “Court’s undemocratic role in U.S. society.” Acknowledging the court’s fundamental role as a white-dominated national defense agency makes recent rulings look less extreme and more in line with the court’s prime mission of defending white power.

    Instead of pushing merely to expand the Supreme Court by adding more justices, we should strip it of its authority by shrinking its jurisdiction and its outsized power over our lives. Better yet, we should be asking ourselves, what steps can we begin taking toward abolishing it?

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • African People Bear the Weight of US’s Deadly “War on Terror” on the Continent

    On the evening of September 20, 2001, then-President George W. Bush addressed the American public and laid the political, military and ideological groundwork for the “war on terror,” a global campaign of allied security forces to end domestic and international terrorism, a term so loosely defined that it soon became a container for anyone from al-Qaeda militants to teenage school shooters to January 6 rioters to leftists and human rights activists. In the same way that the world eventually realized the catastrophic failure of the “war on drugs,” more and more people are realizing that the war on terror is also an unwinnable war against a constantly shifting enemy.

    In this address, Bush promised what followed would not be an age of terror, but “an age of liberty, here and across the world.” Twenty-one years after September 11, this “age of liberty” has ushered in an expanded surveillance apparatus, bloated defense budgets, military invasions and occupations, and the death and displacement of millions of people from Iraq to Somalia. While the Middle East is seen as the locus of the war on terror, one of the most ruthlessly pummeled frontiers of this war is the African continent.

    In 2007, in a post-9/11 political and psychological landscape, President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense, launched U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), which oversees all Department of Defense military operations on the continent in order to “monitor and disrupt violent extremist organizations and protect U.S. interests” because of the continent’s growing strategic importance. Initially based in Stuttgart, Germany, AFRICOM was formed without the input or support of any African leaders, many of whom decried its formation and described it as an attempt to establish more U.S. military bases on the continent. In response, U.S. officials said AFRICOM was meant to provide humanitarian assistance and support peace and stability because “a safe, stable, and prosperous Africa is an enduring American interest.” But critics pointed out that Iraq and Afghanistan, twin targets of the war on terror, serve as clear examples of the disastrous consequences of the U.S.’s militarized “humanitarian” efforts.

    AFRICOM has not created the “safety and stability” invoked by U.S. leaders, but it has expanded the U.S. military’s footprint. During the Obama administration, AFRICOM quickly expanded its reach and influence on the continent through military-to-military trainings, joint counterterrorism operations, foreign aid, and other surreptitious methods that created dependence on AFRICOM for the defense needs of African states. Despite the fact that the U.S. is not at war with any African country, there are 46 U.S. military bases and outposts spanning the continent, with the greatest concentration in the Horn of Africa. Camp Lemonnier, the U.S. base in Djibouti, a small East African nation with a poverty rate of 79 percent, serves as the current home to AFRICOM in the Horn. In 2014 the U.S. government secured a 20-year lease for $63,000,000 a year.

    As AFRICOM’s presence across the continent grows, so does the terrorism it is meant to curb. The 2006 U.S.-backed overthrow of the Union of Islamic Courts in Somalia paved the way for a more militant group, al-Shabab, to grow in rank and reach. This is just one example of how power vacuums caused by U.S. military intervention fortify the political will and strength of terrorist groups.

    In October 2017, in the one of the deadliest terror attacks in Somalia’s history, a truck bombing in Mogadishu killed over 500 civilians, injuring several hundred more. In August 2022, a deadly siege and 30-hour standoff between al-Shabab militants and the Somali security forces at Hotel Hayat in the city center left dozens dead. These attacks point to the country’s fragile security apparatus despite persistent counterterrorism offensives and $243,309,000 in security assistance from the United States in 2022 alone. The U.S.’s decades-long presence has not led to a decrease in terrorist activity but has only caused increased instability in the region and enabled such violence to flourish.

    A 2019 report released by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies found terrorist activity doubled from 2012 to 2018, and the number of countries experiencing attacks increased by 960 percent during that time period. Moreover, there was a ten-fold increase in violent events, jumping from 288 incidents in 2009 to 3,050 in 2018. From Boko Haram’s growth in Nigeria, to al-Shabab’s territorial advancements across Somalia, to Daesh’s reappearance in Libya, by all metrics, the war on terror has been an abysmal failure in Africa. The African people, caught in the nexus of the catastrophic violence of terrorism and ensuing counterterrorism efforts, bear the weight of this failed war.

    While AFRICOM training has not helped African security forces curb terrorism, it has enabled them to repress civilian protests against reactionary African leaders who align with U.S. interests, as evidenced by the crackdown on #EndSARS protesters in Nigeria in 2020. SARS, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, a notorious western-trained unit of the Nigerian Police, has a documented history of human rights abuses. The war on terror not only created the conditions that enabled the U.S. and its allies unfettered collaboration on security and surveillance through shared counterinsurgency tactics, but the development of a shared language and logic. From Lagos to Minneapolis, the designation of terrorist is frequently deployed against individuals or group that challenge the U.S. imperial project or any of its puppet regimes. President Joe Biden’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism is a domestic example of how the state has used the war on terror to criminalize and prosecute protesters and activists.

    The one thing AFRICOM has dramatically succeeded at is boosting corporate profits associated with the lucrative counterterrorism industry that the war on terror has made possible. A 2021 report from Brown University’s Cost of War Project revealed that one-third to one-half of all Pentagon contracts since 9/11 have gone to five transnational weapons corporations: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. From 2001 to 2020, these five companies earned $2.1 trillion from Pentagon contracts. Terrorism is a manufactured political crisis. Unsurprisingly, it is global weapons manufacturers that are tasked with selling the solution.

    On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, George W. Bush lauded the courage and resilience of the American people and said if they ever needed hope or inspiration in the aftermath of the attack, they should “look to the skies” for a reminder of all they have overcome. Meanwhile, a year before Bush delivered this speech at the Flight 93 memorial service, thousands of miles away in southern Somalia, on a clear and sunny day, the air hummed with the sound of U.S. drones flying overhead. A man named Kusow Omar Abukar was eating dinner with his family when they were attacked from the sky. His daughter, Nurto, died. His family’s life was changed forever. The U.S. military claimed there were no civilian causalities and called the strike a success. But even as the U.S. public is encouraged to find comfort and salvation in the heavens, the children of the world live in fear of what the U.S. might unleash from up above. “I no longer love blue skies,” 13-year-old Zubair of North Waziristan told Congress in 2012. “In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey.”

    In his first address to the nation on the evening of 9/11, a solemn Bush asked the American people to pray “for all those who grieve, for those children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security have been threatened.”

    Twenty years later, in an interview with Al-Jazeera, Kusow Abukar looked to the sky and made a different kind of prayer: “Only God can stop America,” he said. “We have no other powers but prayers.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • UK’s New Prime Minister Makes No Apologies for Favoring the Wealthy

    As of Tuesday, Britain has a new prime minister, Liz Truss.

    Forty-seven-year-old Truss served as Boris Johnson’s foreign secretary, establishing a reputation for speaking off the cuff and for being uber-hawkish vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine. In the first week of the war, she publicly voiced her support for British citizens choosing to go and fight on behalf of Ukraine. When Johnson was forced out in July, following months of scandals, his foreign secretary promptly entered the Conservative Party leadership contest, which consisted of a series of votes by members of Parliament (MPs) aimed at winnowing the number of contenders down to two, and then a six-week contest among those two to win the support of a majority of the roughly 160,000 Conservative Party members around the country.

    Although Truss came second in the Parliamentary contest to Rishi Sunak, it was clear from late July onward that she was the more popular of the two among the party’s voters. She pushed a traditional conservative agenda of cutting regulations and slashing taxes — despite the precarious state of the U.K.’s economy, the pressures on the pound, and despite the clear need for massive public expenditures to stave off wholesale misery resulting from double-digit inflation, soaring energy prices and the accelerating climate crisis. And she made no apologies for policies that favored the wealthy.

    Truss also went out of her way to channel Britain’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who remains as iconic among the Tory Party base as Ronald Reagan is for Republicans in the U.S. Truss has studied Thatcher’s body language, has adopted her dress style — as Twitter users were quick to point out — and has reached for many of the same rhetorical tools. Yet, style notwithstanding, she has nowhere near the ideological consistency or heft of a Thatcher.

    Truss was once a Liberal Democrat — she was president of the Oxford student Lib Dems while studying for a degree in politics, philosophy and economics at Merton College in the mid-1990s. (The Liberal Democrats are the third party in the U.K., and while they are progressive on issues such as the environment and opposing Brexit, it was their decision to form a coalition with the Conservatives in 2010 that ushered in more than a decade of Conservative Party rule.) She was also formerly an opponent of Brexit. Her parents were left-wing anti-nuclear protesters. As a student, she gave speeches against the monarchy.

    Perhaps in an effort to prove her bona fides as a conservative to a hard-right base, during the leadership election campaign this summer she marketed herself as even more willing to burn bridges with Europe than was Johnson (if that is possible). Seeking to shore up her support among Conservatives (which is about as representative of the U.K. as a whole as are the most rabid of GOP primary voters in the U.S. as a whole), she came out in favor of a wholesale legislative dismantling of Britain’s remaining EU-era regulations by 2023. She also opined, sanctimoniously, that the “jury is still out” on whether French President Emmanuel Macron is a friend or foe to the British; as if it were the French who had exiled Britain from Europe, rather than Britain inflicting a grievous wound on itself through the entirely unnecessary Brexit process.

    By the time the votes were counted and the verdict delivered on Tuesday, it was clear that Truss had won. Of the just over 140,000 party members who returned their ballots, 81,326 threw their support to the erstwhile foreign secretary.

    It’s possible that Truss will confound her critics and become as formidable a party leader and prime minister as was Thatcher. It’s possible that, like Thatcher, she will buck predictions and end up using the looming economic crisis and the escalating industrial action initiated by trade unions to her advantage, crafting a new electoral coalition capable of transforming the country and winning a series of elections over the next decade-plus.

    Possible, but not likely.

    Truss is inheriting an almighty mess, not from a Labour or Lib Dem government, but from her own party, and from a discredited prime minister who abused his power shamelessly throughout his time at 10 Downing Street. On Tuesday, a day before the monarch’s health dramatically deteriorated, she visited an already ailing Queen Elizabeth in Balmoral to be formally invited by the head of state to form the next government. She then returned to London as the new prime minister, and set to work inviting MPs to join her new cabinet. So far, it looks like she will rely fairly heavily on many of Johnson’s ministers, especially those who represent the hard-right of the party. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng looks set to become chancellor of the exchequer; Education Secretary James Cleverly is going to be made foreign secretary; and Attorney General Suella Braverman, who during the leadership election campaign did her utmost best to channel Donald Trump, is apparently going to be the new home secretary. As the Times of India noted, none of the top cabinet positions will be white men, marking a symbolic changing of the guard, even if the substance of the policies promoted remains as radical-right as ever.

    Truss and her new team will, at speed, have to find ways to bring inflation under control, and to find ways to subsidize the millions of families at risk of destitution due to high heating bills this coming winter.

    In one of her first official acts, the new prime minister imposed a sweeping price freeze on energy, a move long supported by the opposition Labour Party. It’s a vital concession to the realities of Europe’s economic war with Russia; yet her economic team seems to believe they can pay the tens of billions of dollars that this will cost the Treasury by borrowing rather than by raising taxes or even maintaining taxes for the wealthy and for corporations at their current levels — this despite the pound’s swoon in recent weeks against the U.S. dollar. She also announced plans to ramp up drilling for oil and for natural gas in the North Sea, and to increase fracking within the U.K.

    Unlike the German plan announced this week to spend 65 billion euros to curb energy prices and mitigate cost of living increases for pensioners and other vulnerable sectors of the population, Truss’s plan isn’t an across-the-board effort to rein in the profits of energy corporations and to redistribute wealth to poorer residents; rather, it looks to be a one-off intervention — essentially a subsidy to consumers — that won’t address the fundamental problems at play during this inflationary crisis.

    The day Truss was declared the winner in the Conservative Party members’ popularity contest, polls showed her party was trailing the Labour Party by close to 9 percent.

    It will take all of Truss’s shape-shifting talents, and then some, to turn around the election ship for the Conservatives over the coming two years, which is the time span that Truss has before the next general election must be called. In the meantime, as the U.K. grapples with a deepening economic crisis, all of the new prime minister’s public statements suggest that the country is going to be dragged ever-further rightward into a deregulated, anti-union, Brexit-hued future.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Some Youth Don’t Get to Go Back to School Because They’re Stuck Behind Bars

    As families across the U.S. are sending their kids back to school, social media platforms are blowing up with parents’ proud photos of their children entering a new grade. Celebrations like back-to-school picnics, homecoming games and school supply shopping mark this societal rite of passage as symbols of growth, change and the passage of time. For thousands of parents, however, all the back-to-school fanfare serves as a painful reminder of the loss of our children to state-sanctioned violence and oppression.

    I see holidays come and go — Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, New Year’s Eve — without my son, Robert Ornelas. For me, “back to school” especially drives home the fact that, since he was just the age of many high school seniors who are preparing for their transition into adulthood, my son has been forced to watch life through the news, from behind bars. It’s a nightmare I live with. I sleep with it. I eat with it. Wherever I go, in the corner of my mind, in the excruciating back and muscle pain I live with, in the loss of my wife, Robert’s mother who passed away from the pain — it’s there.

    Because of what I and many loved ones have witnessed as the state’s use of COVID regulations as a strategy for barring us from visiting our incarcerated loved ones in prison, I can no longer see my son Robert. I understand the dangers of COVID, but the restrictions are profoundly unfair, especially as the rest of the city, state and country are operating as if the pandemic is over. Even video visits are being canceled, suggesting this is retaliation against prisoners, predominantly people of color, and not strictly a public health measure. The Illinois Department of Corrections has already kept so many of our children and loved ones locked up for decades — they took my son Robert over 30 years ago. These new discriminatory policies are further damaging to the mental health of the incarcerated people and those trying to visit them.

    In 1990, when he was barely 18 years old, Robert was arrested for allegedly committing a double homicide. I do not believe the charges. Police beatings, a form of torture, were used to obtain his false confession — a traumatic and terrifying scenario that is reality for too many marginalized people and their parents in the U.S. Our family has been through an ordeal I would wish on no family.

    Did my son struggle with drugs and gang involvement as he was growing up? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that he is guilty of whatever the police decide to accuse him of. In order to obtain Robert’s signature on their false confession, the police beat him and eventually convinced Robert to say that he committed the murders in self-defense. Like thousands of other people of color who are forced into false confessions, Robert was physically abused and psychologically manipulated, and I am confident he is innocent of the crime.

    The men who tortured Robert, Chicago police officers Steven Brownfield and John Yucaitis, were trained in the police system created by the notorious Jon Burge. Burge was a Chicago police officer through the 1970s and ‘80s, quickly rising through the ranks because of his high case clearance rate — cases that were “solved” based solely on tortured and otherwise coerced false confessions of young working-class Black and Brown people. Burge applied heinous tactics he honed as a military police investigator in Vietnam, and trained his Chicago Police Department (CPD) subordinates in the same. This group of men became known as Burge’s “Midnight Crew,” and they went on to teach these horrific practices to others within the CPD, perpetuating the torture, abuse and mistreatment of the falsely accused and their families while deepening the city’s corruption for years to come. Yucaitis himself was part of this crew, and is associated with nearly two dozen wrongful conviction cases.

    Burge’s torture methods have cost the City of Chicago over $100 million in legal fees and reparations achieved through the tireless efforts of survivors and the political movement that powerfully held them accountable. Four death row prisoners have been pardoned by the governor as result of the terror and corrupt actions of Burge and officers he trained. But the consequences of this abusive culture are still being felt today by many of my friends, including members of the collective I work with, Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity (MAMAS). Many of us are parenting incarcerated survivors of police violence and frame-ups. To be sure, not all survivors have loved ones on the outside supporting them. In this sense, we should also remember those whose stories don’t evoke what stories like mine might — of a parent whose child was kidnapped from their family, parent or mother. At the same time, what the children of the mothers I work with have endured illustrates how the Chicago Police Department is synonymous with corruption and human rights violations directly connected with racism and classism. This is why our collective MAMAS, with the Campaign to Free Incarcerated Survivors of Police Torture (CFIST), are demanding that the State’s Attorney Office vacate convictions for all those framed, tortured and wrongfully convicted.

    Like many convicted through police violence or frame-ups across the country, Robert was sentenced to life without parole even though he was barely past juvenile status. Such a sentence, and the prison-industrial complex overall, are inhumane, and worthy of reconsideration by any society which considers itself “just.” The incarceration of youth, and the police-perpetrated abuse and coercion behind so many convictions, illustrate the brutality of the system as a whole.

    The shameful reality in the U.S. is that nearly 80 percent of juveniles who face life without parole are people of color, many of them from Black and Latinx communities. Where is society’s social media outcry for them? And where are the second chances that are so often granted to their white counterparts?

    This double standard becomes even more frightening as a new, highly conservative Supreme Court — stacked with three Trump appointees following his minority victory in 2016 — has indicated that a judge does not need to determine “permanent incorrigibility” before sentencing a juvenile to life without parole. This reverses years of precedent and understanding that juvenile brains are not fully developed, and disregards that we also know brains do not automatically become fully formed upon turning 18 — that age is arbitrary.

    Washington State’s Supreme Court appears to have recently become the first in the nation from a “brain-development standpoint” to rule that the state “may no longer automatically sentence young adults convicted of murder to life in prison without parole for killings they committed when they were 18, 19 or 20 years old.” Illinois is considering legislation that would do much the same — those convicted at 20 years old and under would, after 40 years, have a chance at parole. Sadly, it is my understanding that the legislation would not be retroactive, meaning that it would not apply to my son — who we maintain is innocent — or others who have been sentenced prior to passage of the legislation.

    I am in my 70s and will not always be here to fight this fight for my only child. With the time I have left, I not only hope the state will give me back the small comfort of safely visiting my son; I also hope more and more people will join me in the effort to free wrongfully convicted survivors of police violence like my son Robert, and all of those suffering behind bars.

    My son has brought his case before the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC), a commission created in 2009 to review claims of police torture in Illinois and to make findings about whether or not those claims are credible. He asserts that in the state police headquarters, Yucaitis and Brownfield “cuffed his ears, kicked him in the shins, slapped and punched him several times, and squeezed his testicles.” As a result, and to stop the brutal treatment, Robert signed a statement confessing that the shooting of the two men from a rival gang in a stolen vehicle was in self-defense. Today, he denies he was the shooter. Whether the two were in a rival gang or in a stolen vehicle is separate from whether they deserve justice — they do. In 2013, the TIRC gave its opinion on Robert’s case, determining that he had presented insufficient evidence to win a new hearing. But my son has now been behind bars for more than 30 years for a crime he didn’t commit. There is enough uncertainty and sufficient evidence of improper police conduct that Robert should be released.

    I remain troubled that similar police abuse was directed against our neighbor, Steve Rymus, in an effort to coerce him to make a statement against Robert. Rymus’s mother also has testified that she saw evidence of police abuse against her son and that he confirmed this to her. Abuse by Chicago police is directed not just against suspects, but against community members suspected only of having testimony — real or conjured — that could help advance the police case. As a foundational demand of the Campaign to Free Incarcerated Survivors of Torture, there is currently legislation being proposed in Illinois that would expand the TIRC’s definition of torture to include the torture and coercion of witnesses — an amendment that could make a huge difference for Robert and others like him. As a commission committed to fairly and accurately investigating claims that torture was used to obtain confessions leading to criminal convictions and providing claimants relief, the TIRC has potential to provide justice to survivors. However, the TIRC remains underfunded, understaffed and limited in scope, with a backlog of nearly 500 claims.

    An abusive policing and imprisonment system has now held my son for over 30 years. Short of action by the governor, my son will spend all but the first seven months of his adult life behind bars. As a member of a working-class Latinx migrant community that is systemically and deliberately targeted by state scrutiny and racial profiling, I am aware that once youth are caught up in the system — guilty or not — there are very few viable options for relief or redemption.

    In this “back-to-school” moment, I urge our society to finally reckon with its mass imprisonment of young people of color who will never have the chance to celebrate the coming of a new school year or consider what they want to be when they grow up. Instead, they will spend their entire adult lives incarcerated, in many cases, on the basis of flimsy evidence coerced by violent and corrupt cops.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump’s Top-Secret Document Hoard Included Nuclear Weapons Data

    Donald Trump now has at least 19 attorneys defending him in eight or more investigations, according to Politico. If the revelations keep piling up, that number could double in about as much time as it takes a box of bunny rabbits to breed. Finding that help won’t be easy, either; this is an area of the law that isn’t lousy with specific experts, and the ones available have this thing about getting paid.

    Plus, the latest development in the saga would have most lawyers running for the hills.

    “A document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by FBI agents who searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club last month,” reports The Washington Post. “Some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them. Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs.”

    If you’re looking for high dudgeon here regarding the high holy sanctity of top-secret documents, prepare for disappointment. Yes, there are secrets, and some of those secrets protect people, I get it, of course… but an awful lot of information has been called “secret” by the government only to keep you from finding out about it, and far too many of us believe we live in a Tom Clancy novel. Abu Ghraib was once a secret, as were the “Pentagon Papers,” and those things existed only because someone believed they could keep a lid on it all. Are we as a country better or worse for those efforts?

    “A fortress mindset feeds the U.S. government’s huge ‘defense’ budget — which is higher than the military budgets of the next 10 countries combined — while the Pentagon maintains about 750 military bases overseas,” author and activist Norman Solomon writes for Truthout. “But victimology is among Washington’s official poses, in sync with a core belief that the United States is at the center of the world’s importance and must therefore police the world to the best of its capacity.”

    The core nature of secrets is their importance, which is why they are usually so well guarded, and why this latest Trump debacle has so many people freaked. Secrets are made portentous by their mystery, and those who are allowed to see them are made very Important, with a capital “I.” I strongly suspect that feeling of Importance is why Trump had this stuff lying around in the first place.

    Understand: No intelligence body on the planet would gladly grant top-secret access to a person like Donald Trump. He is the living embodiment of an easily compromised individual, a walking blackmail target with debts on his debts. The only reason he got his hands on all that stuff is because the country went berserk and made him president, and presidents are automatically gifted top-flight clearance by dint of electoral victory.

    Yet he remains Donald Trump, the blowhard desperate to hide the small fraction of a man within. Even being president of the United States wasn’t enough to assuage his insecurity, so, perhaps, he surrounded himself with boxes of secret documents that made him feel whatever passes for powerful in his shriveled little soul.

    Who knows what country those nuke documents were describing. Israel? China? Russia? Does it even matter at this juncture? Thanks to a million profit-driven war decisions made over the last 80 years, we exist within a wildly delicate latticework of perils that are mostly left over from the Cold War. Not our fault, but all our problem.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump-Appointed Judge Cuts Trump a Huge Break

    Donald Trump is the undisputed world heavyweight champion of getting away with bullshit that would bury any other politician upside down to their ankles, and nobody has been able to properly explain why.

    “He’s not a politician,” goes the refrain, but yes he is. Yes he is. He runs for office. He has PACs, campaign commercials, campaign staffers, he holds delirious political rallies better suited to Huey Long standing on a tree stump with an ax in his hand back when the Depression didn’t have a name yet.

    By some measures, Trump is the single most purely gifted political animal this country has ever produced, and the rules simply do not apply: He defies the courts, borrows money and then screws lenders, stiffs workers and dares them to sue him over the debt, and when he does get hauled into court, he deploys the kind of delaying tactics that would still have the Japanese Army fighting over tiny islands in the Pacific 81 years after Pearl Harbor.

    In another sense, of course, the rules do apply, in that the legal system is built to let people like Trump off the hook, even if it means making extreme exceptions.

    “A federal judge’s extraordinary decision on Monday to interject in the criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive government documents at his Florida residence showed unusual solicitude to him, legal specialists said,” reports Charlie Savage for The New York Times. “This was ‘an unprecedented intervention by a federal district judge into the middle of an ongoing federal criminal and national security investigation,’ said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at University of Texas.”

    Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee and member of the right-wing Federalist Society, has ordered a special master to be placed in charge of the hoard of top-secret documents recovered from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in Florida. The order gives the special master vast powers of denoting what may and may not cover both executive and legal privilege, and blocks investigators from reviewing the documents until the master says otherwise.

    The order is, in whole and in part, a huge break for Trump and the Republican Party. The investigation into Trump’s astonishing mishandling of incredibly sensitive intelligence materials was turning into the kind of legal hairball that even the luckiest of politicos fail to survive, and further threatened to turn the entire 2022 midterm election into a dual referendum on Trump and Roe. For the time being, the paper chase is on hold.

    MSNBC’s Joy Reid questioned Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation, on the ruling. “How on Earth could a judge who made it through law school think that Donald Trump can take the property of the government, the federal government, take it home and then have to have a special master decide whether they can investigate him?” she asked.

    “Because she’s biased and corrupt,” Mystal replied. “I’ve been saying this since he took office. When you allow Republicans to control the courts, you get nothing. Trump judges do not believe in the rule of law. They do not believe in precedent. They do not believe in facts. They do not believe in logic. They just believe in whatever’s going to help Donald Trump and they’ve proven it again and again and again.”

    This may all come to nothing in the fullness of time, but it does give Trump’s defenders a long opportunity to chop away at issues of attorney-client and executive privilege, both of which reside in a foggy realm thanks to the nuances of presidential power. Simply put, the White House has never experienced a figure like Trump, which means the boundaries of acceptable behavior remain unestablished.

    “Executive privilege refers to private communications presidents have with their advisers and other types of internal communications within the executive branch that are withheld from public release,” reports CNN. “While disputes over the privilege have come up in congressional investigations, the reaches of executive privilege — particularly when a former president is arguing it should apply when a current president is declining to assert it — is an unsettled area of law.”

    The decision will almost certainly be appealed, but should such an appeal visit the Supreme Court, I trust the Roberts Rogues to handle this properly about as much as I trust the Red Sox bullpen to get to the ninth inning without raining home run balls on the bleacher seats.

    Donald Trump has caught yet another break. He will get to dig in behind his plans to run for president again, and will use these legal maneuvers as fundraising tools even as he slathers himself in martyrdom. There are hundreds of Trump judges out there now, with three of them on the highest court in the land.

    The legal system was built to prop up people like Trump, not to take them down. This is the world we live in, and although it might be enraging, it should not surprise us at all.

  • Our Labor Is Used to Create Wealth for Others. Let’s Reclaim It to Make Life.

    In the last years of his life, my father spent many days in intensive care. He had emphysema, the product of too many cigarettes and exposure to asbestos and silica dust at the glass factory where he labored for 44 years. Once during a visit, he said from his oxygen tent that a man was following the nurses around, marking down whatever they did. The nurses were trying to form a labor union, and the observer was noting their times and motions, no doubt in an effort to spot wasted efforts that had to be corrected and to intimidate them. My father said, “Dad did that to me once.”

    My grandfather was an industrial engineer, the company man with the stopwatch timing workers’ motions so that these could be reengineered and the workers ordered to perform their jobs with greater “efficiency”; that is, faster, resulting in increased glass production per hour and more profits for the employer. Grandpa “time-studied” his son, illustrating perfectly that workers, no matter their capacities, interests — in a word, their humanity — are, to those who hire them, simply commodities to be manipulated and controlled. Treated no differently than the raw materials, tools, machinery and buildings with which the employees interact to produce the goods and services of modern society.

    I have studied and written about work for more than 50 years, my own and that of many others, to uncover its nature, what its consequences are for those who do it, and what might be done to change it for the better. My last book reflects what I have learned; it is titled Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle. Its thesis is simple. In a capitalist economy, businesses, spurred by incessant competition, seek to make maximum profits and to use these to achieve high, unending growth. To get what they want, however, they must rigorously control what goes on in their workplaces. The power to do this is embedded in the nature of our system: A few individuals own society’s productive wealth, while the many need access to it to survive. The latter then must sell their ability to work to the former. While the advantage obviously lies with the few, the desires of employers and workers diverge, as anyone who has worked knows. Those who labor are controlled, treated as objects, but this necessarily negates the fact that workers cannot think of themselves as commodities. Workplaces are thus alive with tensions. Management must try to control the labor process, the way in which work is done, if it is to thrive, but this must be done in the face of potential resistance, in form of sabotage, slowdowns, strikes, picketing, boycotts, mass quitting and political agitations.

    The essence of management is control, and the history of capitalism is but a sequence of the implementation of “control mechanisms.” (My book provides the detail of these, their effects on workers and the possibilities for radically changing the way we labor. Here we can give only a summary.) At capitalism’s dawn, people worked at home, producing cloth, for example, with wool loaned (put out) to them by merchants who were now capitalists. When this proved inefficient, the owners of the wool herded the weavers into factories, hiring women and children (often orphans) to aid them. Here, the employer could watch them to make sure they stole no wool and, importantly, to see exactly how they performed their labor tasks. The factory whistle served to habituate those who toiled inside to the rhythms of a new work regimen, punishing those who were late or left early.

    The supervisors hired to watch over their charges soon saw that a person trained in a craft divided his task into component parts — that is, details or subtasks. It was a short step to see that it would be cheaper to hire untrained workers — at first, mainly women and orphaned children — to do the details and reserve the craftsmen for what the untrained laborers could not do. The number of people who could perform each detail was very large, and this kept wages low and employees fearful of being easily replaced. Once power sources such as water wheels and steam engines could make effort independent of the workers’ bodies, some of the subtasks were mechanized. Machines could control workers directly, making them “appendages” to a mechanism, to use Karl Marx’s famous word. Furthermore, as mechanization became more sophisticated, work became further degraded, such that the human ingenuity needed for the labor process to proceed successfully diminished as the level of mechanization increased.

    Toward the end of the 19th century, Frederick Taylor took the existing managerial control mechanism — centralization in factories, the detailed division of labor and mechanization — and systematized them into what he termed, “scientific management.” The conceptualization of work processes would be the sole prerogative of the employer. His band of industrial engineers would do what my grandfather did. Workers would now simply be machine-like parts in an automatic system, carrying our explicit orders and nothing else. Personnel departments, now called Human Resources, offered carrots and sticks, such as incentive plans, modest fringe benefits, demotions, transfers and terminations to keep workers happily and fearfully hard at work. If readers intuit that Taylor’s aim was to speed up production so that profits rose, they would be correct.

    Led by the Toyota Corporation, “Taylorism” has been extended and deepened in what is called “lean production,” or as its critics call it, “management by stress.” This form of control includes many elements:

    * Systematic Hiring: Employers use metadata, personality tests and interviews to find people who easily take orders, identify with business, won’t likely support a union and will tolerate an intense work environment.

    * Team Production: Using techniques developed by the military, companies divide employees into teams, fostering team loyalty and a competitive spirit in which workers are happy to pit themselves against other teams, plants and business rivals.

    The cover of <i>Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle</i>.
    The cover of Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle.

    * Cross-Training: Here, the idea is to have people think they are learning new skills, while the reality is that they are simply learning to do other subtasks. Work processes had already destroyed the integrity of task (skilled) labor in which one person performed a job from beginning to end. A metalsmith with a work order to make 100 funnels would make the pattern and then do each of these subtasks 100 times in succession: layout, cutting, shaping, joining, polishing and decorating (if needed). If people are hired to do each subtask only, then metalsmiths need only make the pattern. With cross-training, a person might be trained to do two instead of one of the subtasks, neither of which requires much knowledge or training.

    * Just-in-Time Inventory: Parts, such as car steering wheels, are produced in subsidiary plants (saving money because the subsidiary workers are paid less, even if unionized, and now no money will be spent on inventory space and maintenance by the main plant). Workers in the primary facility will now be fearful their work will be subcontracted. For some production, it is possible that the external facilities will be exported abroad, further splitting the workforce and lowering costs. Today, this concept can be applied to workers, from those in fast food to the adjunct faculty that teach most of the classes in U.S. colleges, resulting in extreme stress and insecurity.

    * Kaizen: Japanese word for “constant improvement.” This is a perpetual speed-up mechanism. For example, an assembly line might be sped up, a team might lose a member or inventory might be in short supply. Teams are then expected to solve the problem. This is where cross-training is most useful to businesses. Extreme pressure is put on teams, often through a system of lights that can go from green (good) to yellow (warning for teams to start hustling) to red (production will stop, and woe to the workers). Now, U.S. auto workers can expect, as a result of Kaizen, to work 57 seconds out of every minute.

    * Extreme Surveillance: I call this the “panopticon,” after philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s plan for a circular prison with cells arranged so a guard can see all those incarcerated without them knowing if he was watching. Grandpa would have been astounded at the extent and degree to which employees are subject to employer monitoring. App developers are in competition to supply employers with ever more invasive ways to spy on those they employ. Even consumers have been used by businesses like hotels and colleges to surveil workers. What else can we call student evaluations, including external ones such as Rate My Professor and ratings on websites like Yelp and TripAdvisor?

    The effects on workers of all this control are wholly negative — stress, diminished mental and physical health, anxiety, depression, substance abuse and sometimes violent behavior — just what we would expect when human beings toil under the command of others. The etymological roots of the word “work” connote torment, compulsion, affliction and persecution. These well reflect the reality of labor for most of the world’s toilers. The global labor force is about 3.5 billion persons. Of these, 800 million are farmworkers. Partly uncounted in the labor force are at least 160 million child laborers, some of them under 10 years old toiling in dangerous workplaces such as metal mines. In 2020, there were about 1.5 billion people in “vulnerable” employment: self-employed women, men and children doing everything from making deliveries, sewing clothes, producing cheap cigarettes, and selling goods and services on the streets to scavenging mine waste for saleable metal and garbage dumps looking for anything that can be converted to cash. Even in the richest country in the world, which workers would not grasp these words immediately among the tens of millions who deliver mail and packages; drive trucks and buses; labor along the assembly and disassembly lines that give us our cars, trucks and meat; clerk in grocery stores and other retail establishments; sweat on kitchen lines preparing food; provide our health care; clean our offices and buildings; teach in our schools; do clerical work; perform yard work; build houses; tar our roofs and road; and many other labors large and small?

    On this Labor Day, perhaps it is time for all members of the world’s working class, to ask themselves, why is work so often a “torment,” an “affliction,” done under “compulsion”? Why does it feel as if our bosses are “persecuting” us? Why does it wreck our bodies? Why does it seem so meaningless? It certainly doesn’t have to be and was not for most of our time on Earth. And then ask, if this is true, how can we create a society in which we control our own labor, where work is a natural and necessary part of life, one we do to produce the essentials of life, not for someone else’s riches but for use by everyone, equally and in harmony with the natural world?

    In answer to these questions, perhaps every labor union, workers’ center, grassroots political organization and newly formed groups of those who want to change the world should embrace the slogan of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement: “Occupy, Resist, Produce.” Use the wealth of unions, political organizations and the pooled money of workers to buy land and produce food on it collectively; build new, cheap, energy-efficient housing — training people to both do and control the work. Forge worker-community cooperatives and collectives. Pressure governments everywhere to aid these efforts. Compel employers, by organized strength, to change the way work is done. Demand a say over the introduction of new technology. Insist on an end to employer surveillance.

    The possibilities are many, and the goal of unalienated work is of the greatest importance. How can capitalism be transcended and a new world constructed unless the essence of this system — controlled labor — is abolished?

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.